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I don't think there's no shame admitting that we make mistakes, that's where you learn from. Sometimes even with DYOR, legit looking projects turn out to be scams. And sometimes we just want to risk it.

During last bullrun ico frency 2017-2018 many people were saying that ICO scams are now over and next time people will be smarter. However now there are more scams then ever, especially rug pulls in uniswap and pancakeswap. We just don't call them ICOs anymore.

My failures of judgement contain 2 icos from many years ago which were obvious scams in hindsight : Swiss Alps Mining (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4861923.0), Envion (https://www.envion.org/) and one latest where Dev disappeared after i aped in to some BSC shittoken for the hopes of 2x-10 flip (i can't even remember the name of it).

Luckily i haven't invested anything i couldn't lose (to scams anyway), and i have even made money with investing to something that turned out to be scam later on. But still they are obviously annoying.

So i would like to hear your stories on how did you get scammed. Was it because you aped in without research or something else?

For ico fraud I experienced 3 in 2018, 2 in 2019. And that's all I did without research. I bought and invested there based on high Twitter followers and the active community in telegram. I don't even remember the name of the project because I just joined in. I even found out the project was a scam after the telegram was inactive for a few months. i admit i am very stupid haha

Im so glad that i never invested in the scam icos, even when the icos became failed and I could still leave the market without any loss.

I were always doing research with my friends. I were only using icodrop as a way to determine which ico will become the legit project.

Flow, solana, ADA, injective, and many more. Im glad that I have become the early investors of those projects.

quite a lot, because I invested heavily in new projects. 2017-2018 was the worst year for me. My portfolio has become worthless, and I was fooled by many scam projects. That's why I'm no longer interested in investing in ICO/IEO/IDO, I'm more interested in projects that have been tested and have a large market cap.

When I notice that the prices of ICO tokens listed on exchanges are jumping up especially when coins are listed on binance, I started thinking of buying as an early investor and then sell when listed. The good part is that bounty hunters will not have the chance to sell it yet because investors are the first to get the tokens on binance.  I sent a tiny bit of ETH just to test ICO project. I have some success and failures as well in making a profit.

The scammers in 2018 have the guts to show their faces on linkedin which will make you believe they are real people. Later you know you are scammed if someone figured the photos they put on their team profile are fake.

I  have not put any money on the ICO created by scammers, but I do put effort by joining their bounty campaign and advertising them in this forum later found out that they aren't willing to pay their bounty participants and later they turned into a scam.  I believe majority of us had experienced this kind of thing.  So I guess this is the same as putting money into their project.  If I recall almost majority of the bounty campaign during 2018 - 2019 turned to scam their bounty participants so I couldn't even recall how many times I had been scammed since in all the campaign I joined, only a few of them paid.

talking about the scammer problem at the ICO, I think I was involved in several projects with promising prospects, but from what I remember, I did not get my money back. from this point on, I really do my selection of what I choose. however, ICOs are still profitable if you choose really good ICOs. however, for now, it looks like we need to be careful to avoid scammers.

I didn't participate in any ICOs but I did invest in a lot of scam projects on Ethereum. Several projects rugpulled liquidity and another deployed a contract that doesn't let you sell. From then on I began only investing in mineable projects like 0xMR and RVN. Those projects have no dev wallets so it's impossible for them to exit scam or rug-pull. My investments are now safe.

Thats how we have been fall for those newly created projects. I also invested in a scam ones before. Bought  cheap shitcoins that until now has a no value at all in exchange of ethereum. I bought it for some ethereum not aware  before that those coins are  not worthy enough to hold. Indeed a lesson learned that we might choose the established and potential ones rather than taking a risk to those newly projects.

As far as i remember i have put my money into the scam project when yearn finance was getting hyped. There were bunch of scam projects when defi got hyped last year.
So many bubble appearing used the popuilarity that already gained by YFI. The same situation is happening with dogecoin right now.
Dogecoin makes a lot of new bubble is popping out.

to be honest investing in ico I was never fooled because I always check and rely on Fomo from other people, but the most part is when buying shitcoin that is released on the pancakeswap. because of the hype many say it can generate 2 to more than 100x as much, I tried several times and loss, since then I never bought that again.

I can't say I've funded scammers before but I've surely give them a helping hand with their scam projects, yes year ago I was so hooked with crypto mining so I went ahead and buy some mining rigs just to mine new coins, my mistake was I should have mine coins like Ethereum or bitcoin but instead I ended up mining new alt coins hoping that I will become more successful this way but in the end almost all the coins I mined are dead

I can't remember but I think I have bought several coins that in the end, it is either dumped to oblivion or abandoned by the developer.  I also remember that I bought hashminer from Josh Garza's gawminer and even bought paycoin because it was too hot that time.  I was lucky to sell all my mining power and paycoin and be able to get out of the scheme with profit.

I've also gone through a couple of times, not really many times for me to realize which projects are legitimate. Seeing them all problems are rooted in greed, and they take advantage of it to take our money. Even when I found out about projects with signs of fraud, I have been making a profit from those projects. I must say that for many years in this market, I can control and be satisfied with what I had.

I am not ashamed to say that I've fallen prey to scammers severally in the past, I can't even remember how many, but the good side of the story still remains that I've made more money far more than I've lost to scammers and failed projects.
My first scam experience was in 2015 at the very beginning of what we call IEOs today, the scammer got his coin listed on an exchange(Kuwait coin is the name of the coin, can't forget for sure), we invested in the project by buying the coin from the exchange, at the end, the scammer withdraw all the money he earned from selling his coin on the exchange and ran away, abandoning the project, the exchange closed trading and deposit, they only allowed everyone to withdraw the shitcoins that has no where else to trade them, that was how we all lost our money.
I've also been a part of a project which I luckily earned a lot of money from, but later, the project turned scam, I participated in their bounty campaign and also invested in their public sale, at the end, the token was listed on uniswap and it was like I knew the project won't last, I didn't bother hodling, I sold off all my coins at the very first opportunity, coins I earned from bounty and that which I bought all together, I sold everything earning quite a lot of money luckily, returning to the project about two weeks later, I discovered they've rug pulled on the investors and disappeared, lots of shit things happening in crypto.

BSC has provided a 20x flip profit for SAFEETH trading, for trading I do not have detailed research on BSC tokens but take advantage of every moment to gain profit, the trading is clearly very risky so it is not recommended for anyone.

Very few or next to none, I forgot the number but honestly I rarely fall into those scammers' trap just by knowing that if something is too good to be true then maybe that isn't real or just a scam. Most of the scams that I've observed also seem to offer some unrealistic reward like get return of 5% of total investment every day which by logic alone you couldn't obviously distinguish it that it's just to lure people into their scam. But I don't consider the investment that I've brought to some potential project which ended up failed as scam after all business isn't always smooth and anything could go wrong almost instantly.
Also, just don't investment if there's a doubt in your mind regarding the project that you're about to invest to.

My very first investment in the crypto space turned out to be a scam. That was back in August 2017 i think and i invested into the ICO of DimCoin. It was an african project and they managed to raise a huge amount of money (14M USD). Shortly after the ICO the CEO of the project left which was already a bad sign. Then nothing at all happened for some time. Suddenly a part of the team left DimCoin and created their own project, probably with the money they got from the DimCoin ICO. To make a long story short the project was and is a complete scam. Thank god i only invested 150$ because it was my very first investment and i didn't want to risk more money. Other poor people invested thousand of dollars and lost it all though.

I'm not sure I have invested money in crowdfunding like ICO...Though I have contributed/promoted certain ICOs in the past.
 
I lost few crypto on  a popular cryptocurrency exchanges that suddenly impose kyc without notifying me and probably other customers. I just decided to leave the crypto for them rather than sending my private info to people that could abuse it. I guess you could consider that a scam even though I didn't actually lose the money. Their kyc requirement is way risky than my fund on the exchange... so I let the fund go.

Two big scams I can remember myself. Others weren't so much scams as just bad buys (I bought tokens and they did end up being listed but they just never achieved anything great and they at least did develop some kind of product.

What hurt most was that the scams were actually the ones I put the most DYOR effort into. Reputations, etc, escrows, whatever. But when a centralized project wants to scam, they scam. Nothing can help you then.

Maybe not scammed because i bought the coin without any promise from the site. But i bought a coin maybe if someone remember, PFC which created from online mining site. I already get profit but then the mining be scam and then the coin don't have value anymore. My biggest losses in trading.

I still remember that i was scammed three times. I invested almost half of my savings. I have been such a loser that time. I was so disappointed and easy to get mad because of what happened to me. Because i can easily trusted someone without knowing their intentions because that time I thought they are helping me to earn and have a profit, but it's not. Anyway past is past and I have learned my lessons not to trust so easily.

I never invested in ICOs but I invested many shitcoins in the year 2018 without doing research of the project. I'm hoping that I will get rich if I hold shitcoins for long, I'm so very optimist but they were all scams, the dev just abandoned the project, ran with the money without a traced.

Many people have being involved in many scam projects starting from ICO days till date, at least in my own case I have involved with many as well, and the funny thing most times they come with good ideas, features and so on, all in a bid to look legit but at the end, they still scam their investors; I think I would say only a very few (maybe around 5%) are really genuine and ready to last long term. Also, nowadays, I think the best way to go about investing in new projects is doing so through top platform's, be it IDO, IFO , or IEO, in this way you are sure of not getting scammed as you can sell once listing takes place or wait till further price surge. With more growth of the crypto space comes with more scammers, so it's very important for everyone to be careful.

I guess most of the people are aware that the project will likely scam. They just do it because they hope that they will get rich real quick. Like you said, they take risk. They know it won't end up well in the long run. Hence they try their luck. They put some money in, hopes a hype is going to be created (and they shill for it too) and exit as soon as possible. They do succeed most of the time, while others suffer. Or sometimes, altogether everyone loses when the developer decides to make a early exist scam. People who does this actually encourages those scammers. And because of them others also fall for those scams.

ICO has provided invaluable experience to increase knowledge in conducting research on new projects, everyone has felt a loss at an ICO even though it is small in nominal terms, but this does not make us give up. I think top IDO is the solution to reverse previous losses as it only accepts a very limited number of whitelists compared to ICOs that target too high reached token sales.

Not with any project.

I have a weak heart and not into ICO before that's why I was so lucky that didn't invested and didn't scammed by them. But I missed a lot of opportunities.

Unlike those investors that have a strong risk taking attitude, they've invested to a lot of ICOs and made a lot of money from it. But just as op, there were a lot of scams before.

Then I say good for you. I also got burnt by ICOs as I stated in my earlier post, and I too missed a lot of opportunities which is what led me to go into ICOs in the first place. But all the research I put in and time wasted, I might as well have gone in randomly and maybe even hit a good altcoin.

Lesson is always that if you're not an expert and not too smart and don't have too much time. Invest in Bitcoin.

2017-2018 It has been a stupid year for me because I believe in investing in projects that are not clearly ICOs without doing some research and buying the wrong altcoins. For all those who are currently interested in investing, especially DeFi and NFT, which are currently in great demand, I suggest being more selective so that later when the market is bearish you are ready to face a pretty fantastic decline like in 2018

There are too many scam ICO's back in 2018, raising the fund them after it will not pay them their participants and go away. Good to know that the admins take down most of the projects and give them red flag to avoid joining them. I don't always participate in their crowdfunding but I like to support them by promoting them here in the forum so that I can get paid. I put little money back in 2018, but it's not work out and the money that I put totally gone too. I realised I will not do that again and give some more time for research about the project and how transparent they are.

For ICO, there are many specially those in 2019. I got 3 which gives me more knowledge on how to spot one and how to protect my funds. I also do bounties and got paid by scam coins also which is worth nothing sadly.

Scammer got me once when I was a new in cryptoworld, I send ETH hoping to get more ETH in return only to find out that, it was a scam and I lose money that time. I almost got scammed with so many ICO’s before but fortunately, I was able to leave right before the team exit the market. I guess early users here in the forum have their own story about scam project, the market is over populated that time with fake projects.

Will you mind if you can share your method on how to spot scam project? That will be beneficial to the Bitcointalk community since tons of scam ICO existing daily and still many newbie fell for it though.

This is the saddest part to here. Because scammers are using free advertisement from Bounty hunters who has no idea about the service they are promoting.

I never put money in to envoin and alp mining, first time i got scamed was LTC gear which operate by bee keeper and i think a lot of people here got scamed by him. After that tragedy i never buy any bitcoin cloud mining. For the ICO, i put on AAVE, Swissborg, dent and pundixwhich is not scam project.

Omg. I have been fooled so many times that it is quite embarrassing to talk about it. I have been in this industry for soooooo long and have seen good projects that are obviously better than the ones I invested in. Its just that my dumb eyes back then were easily fooled by baseless and too good time be true promises. Good thing though is I only invest amounts that are of not that much use to me so I can easily move on from the pain. But still though, I could've been sitting on hundreds of thousands of dollars had I invested in the right ones instead back then. I even invested on doge due to my stupidity back then but sold when I realised it was a joke of a coin but now I feel even more dumb than ever watching how much dogecoin went up in price recently. This industry is making me nuts!

Form my 4 years crypto life I did not put any money to scammer box before this year. But a few months ago I invested in a ICO (defi project) about 1 ETH. It was my bad that I did not investigate more the project. I thought I am gambling this (Go high or nothing). I lost the money. This was my first ICO investment and I lose that money. :)

In 2018 there were a lot of people losing money with scam ICO, at which point people were investing in ICO based on hype.
I also participated in a few ICOs at that time and lost my money, it was a sad experience.

I was one of the victims. At that time I was still a newbie and was carried away by the hype, so I joined ICO without doing any analysis first. yes, it's purely my fault. after that I lost up to 80%. I forgot the name of the project, which I don't want to remember anymore. lol
That's an important lesson for me, since then I have been more careful before joining any project and prefer projects that are already running and have good prospects.

I think that year there were also many who experienced the same thing.

For scam projects, gladly, I never experienced it.
However, for such kind of shitcoins because only following the hype at that time was yeah, it is likely a funny experince. Let's see the Ignis and NXT. they are not scams, but maybe many people know how the progress of these coins  ;D
But, let it flow and let it be, at least, it can be my important  experience where not to put my money into hyped coins or tokens, because this is very risky. Although always being ready for all kind of risks, at least, we are better to minimize the risks or avoid the risks.

Every ICO I have ever invested in turned out to be a scam or a failure. Paragon Coin, BitDice, Edgeless, and SIFT have all failed miserably. I don't know if they were all intending to scam or it just turned out that way but I have been really disappointed with ICOs.

Thank God, I still haven't experienced being scammed yet. I don't know if its because I'm cautious or just too Anxious to let go of my fund. Either way, by reading from this Thread I learned and increased my knowledge on how not to get scam in the future. BAck in my early transactions, some of my mates would  get angry for losing to scam but later on they'll just let it go cause it's what risk takers like them would do.

None for me.

When I'm still starting to learn cryptos, there was a time where I focused on scams and I researched what are the common ways these scammers are using when they are scamming people and luckily after some research I didn't fall into their traps until now.

I know that being scammed is part of every investor especially when they are starting. Being scammed once is still ok but being scammed twice with the same strategy that scammers are used?? That is pure ignorance already. As an investor, you should know which projects/investments are scams and which are not.

P.S. I still remember I want to invest into Fantom ICO last 2017 when they launched it but unfortunately, I'm not one of the whitelisted investors. That is the first ICO that I want to invest with but I didn't and now 4 years after their token sale, it went up more than 50x already. Anyway, that is what it is :D. Just move on.

Lol, I'm glad I didn't make any mistakes with scam projects.  Maybe, I'm a bit sensitive and I always do thorough analysis, keep an eye on important situations, I'm quite a perfectionist for ICOs, I would rather not invest my money, not put my money on the spoilers.  .. I have quite good psychological control over the calling situations from the community.  No, I am not overshadowed by an unrealistic, illusion!

The market boom will last very long since this year.  Therefore, I hope the boys use the wisdom of their eyes to cleanse the projects of sabotage, deception, occupation and causing consequences to this space.  Be passionate in a wise way!

About 5-10 I think I like to invest in doubler or Ponzi/Pyramid schemes when I was new in crypto,
I also like to ride on gamblers they would play with our money and give back a fixed reward since I believe on their skills but some of them would only be good for a few times and would run away with your money.
I know it was my fault for trusting those kind of people or investment so I just take it as an experience and lesson to never trust those kind of investment again.

very much, even I joined the bounty campaign of those scam projects. I even forgot how many projects I participated in, they seemed very professional in releasing projects, but in the end they turned out to be scammets. I invested a lot even though it wasn't that big between 50-100$ per project. but still suffer a huge loss if all counts.

I did not invest money to participate in other activities such as ICO，But I spend a lot of time doing bounties or airdrops, and many of them are not harvested，So now I just need to find a good project to do it.

I'm not sure that I have a moral right to tell my story because it so happened that I did not put any personal dollar, only time. I raised a little capital by completing bounty tasks of various types. But I can say with confidence that my whole story is 80% scam. Despite the huge amount of time spent on companies, I never received payment for my work. To be more specific, I can summarize the statistics of participation in bounty companies in 2018-2019, so that the next one going this way would know what awaits him on the way.
And so, on average, I spent 2 hours a day, 6 days a week on tasks. It turns out about 52 hours per month. Of these 52 hours - actually paid, it turned out 10 hours (here you have to believe me, although I can give my calculations in excel  ;D). Considering this, an hour of my work was worth 70 dollars. Consequently, I received less than $ 2940 per month. For your information, bounty companies last a couple of months on average.
Summary: it is up to everyone to decide whether to participate in bounty campaigns or not.
From myself, I can say that it is rather unpleasant to waste your time)

Luckily I have never invested in a scam project, but I did invest in shitcoin. I invested during the market crash around mid 2018, they promised a minimum of 5x, and stupidly I believed it because it made sense. and until now the token was worthless, lol

I wasn't scammed. I was almost got my wallet hacked back in 2018-2019. I can't quite remember the exact date.

It was from an airdrop of a certain new coin that is about to run their ICO. I put in my junk details to avoid possible identity theft, then I checked my junk email that day and got an email from the airdrop. It was that they want me to claim my token, but then it was a clone MEW site that I got led into. Almost put in my private keys there, but I already smelled the first fishiness of the site on how the css and layout of the site looked like.

I have never participated in an ICO made by a scam or original, but I was fooled by individuals with the purchase of token which I have the lure of big transactions without a rekber . there are at least 3 different projects, but I am not ashamed to say that I have fallen prey to scammers several times in the past, because it was  become my lesson for now , and not to sell tokens outside the market anymore

i dont really participate in ico but its slightly inevitable to fall for one especially perfected ones even with the team and everything if you really do participate in it. this is mostly common with shitcoins which are rampant now. but everything is a lesson which we must take every lesson with us and apply it forward.

Previously participated in such projects... It's good that i didn't involve my friends or strangers in such projects. After losing money i decided not to risk anymore in such projects it's better to under-earn than to lose everything.

you lost your money so thats not what you called under earn but under earn is when you have some funds left or you sell at a loss and that is the best thing to do if you are sure that the value of your token will go down deep but you have learned your lesson because you are not investing in the same kind of projects .
 lets not waste time on scam and unsure projects because we have legit cryptos that we can invest in . btc to name one

2017 was a tough year at this point, you're right this is how we learn.
Now I'm checking the info like 100 times before investing!
And I always talk with newcomers to explain them and share my experience, making sure scammers won't earn anything BUT there are lots of stupid people around as well and they won't listen to you even If you warn them
Crypto is a very risky thing, but once you found a couple great projects you will be ok  ::)
Good Luck

This is not an easy one to say. I have traded countless cryptocurrencies, I don't remember how many went to bottom and how many made it. I had to stop in 2018 as everything was looking very bad, and restarted again last year with altcoin trading. I have lost money to projects that were not exactly scams, or at least not having been accussed as that. But maybe when the founders dump their stack of dev tokens this is a scam too. I see the overall performance of my investment and have in mind that many of those may be scams, or shady with devs getting ready to dump.

Investing in scam projects and falling into FOMO is something many have been involved in.
A lot of people participating in the crypto market in 2018 face the same situation as you. At that time people were easily deceived by the lies of scammers and were willing to invest in new projects without even studying it.

I only joined in different ICO projects through bounty campaign, but I never try neither to think of it to invest in any of them.
Because, I knew that buying or investing in any of the ICO is too risky actually, and I've seen a lot of investors got run their investment
after the ico project collected a huge amount of fund but I am not saying all of them, of course there is still some of them are legit to join
in anyhow.

As I said above, though, not even good projects that you spend days and weeks to do due diligence can guarantee you it's safe.

So no need to feel humiliated I guess. I feel really bad thinking about it but I try to see those experiences as lessons that I've learnt and hopefully use to remind me never to trust people too much, no matter how good things look and feel.

That's the situation with me. And I believe with many others here too. The DYOR thing doesn't seem to work most of the time because one may not even know the right places to look. Scammers are very clever. They can mask the tiniest bit of item that will give them away, except one is lucky to have stumbled on that slip before it's erased. Sometimes this slip can come from an insider who may not like the idea of others in the team scamming innocent investors. I suffered a few times in 2017 when I newly joined this crypto industry. I had invested heavily in ICOs only for most of them (if not all) to vanish. This is the single reason you won't catch me investing in ICOs today, no matter how profitable an ICO project may sound. I don't, and won't. I rather wait for the project to be listed on reputable exchange before investing.


Why would anyone know that a project is a scam or a ponzi and still invest in it? That's stupid risk.

when investing in ICO there were several fraudulent projects that have taken my money and among them I even invested my money as much as $ 1000 in a project called Bitconnect and while investing in ICO, the Bitconnect project was a project that I lost the most money at that time, meanwhile In other ICO projects, I would only invest as much as $ 100- $ 200 and to be honest I have given up on investing in ICOs and better trade now.

Thankfully, I haven't put even a cent in a scam project so far.  ;D  But it doesn't mean it is guaranteed that I won't unwittingly also. We all should be very careful about scammers really. There are many projects in the market which may seem as credible but they're not actually.

In the past, I lost quite a lot of money from my work in 2017 due to the wrong choice of ICO investment. Right now I already have a limit on investing in the high risk investment category. which will be my guide to be more selective in choosing. Of course I don't want to be wrong in choosing an altcoin. now when the market is experiencing an upward trend there will be many new projects that appear. and I anticipate being careful in choosing

I got scammed not for my money but my time because I worked for a project for as long as I could as I was their ANN, website and whitepaper translator and later, they scammed everyone by putting everything offline. I lost around $1000 which could have been worth a lot more if the project worked out as expected, and a lot of time that I dedicated behind their thread.

yes, of course I think everyone has experienced events like this, especially new in the crypto world. And I have also been fooled by things like this even though the losses are only small but in the past I never learned from mistakes and greedy when it comes to great rewards.
but for now it's different, I am more patient and do more research first because in the past I was more concerned with my greed and now I have started to understand how the system in crypto works I have made my dark experiences in the past a valuable lesson

I just felt 1, sha-256.io
Have you ever heard that name?  ;D

When it comes to ponzi/hyip then there are lots i had funded in due to greediness.

-Hashocean
-Those obvious doublers/HYIP

When it comes to ICO

-Snovio
-Kickcity
and more....

If i do have just simply save up those coins on long  term then i might already be a millionaire on the current market condition.
Its just stressing a bit on minding those bad experiences again.

Joined ICO, local project the developer is same country as me. But the project really hype and look very promising. But after ICO end, the dev showing off new phone and people start think that the guy bought it with money from ICO. And then usage of investment money that different from their whitepaper make the coin die instantly. A lot of people lose in their investment include me.

2017 - 2018 I have never funded or invested in, but I ran out of time to hunt for fake coins so that I never got to profit, there were only fake coins that had no price.

In the 2017 - 2018 period there were so many fake coins that were born that some of them are now dead and will never have a price, which is still there, but most of the fake coins were born in 2018 alone.

I can tell you most of the low income earners in crypto has fallen victim of investing in this scam shits since the emergence of SAFEMOON, SAFEMARS and the likes. Many of those shit coins appear to be the next big thing until their owners suddenly rugpull and run away with investors funds.

There is no amount of research you can do on shit coins that can bring a positive feedback. You just take your chances and also take your losses if they go otherwise.

Yes.

That strategy and decision will never go wrong.

That's usually the scene in the ICO or crowdfunding before. They're all hype based and those projects that survived are lucky to still remain and push what's on their whitepaper. But if a project has seen a very bad progress, they'll be having the other path that all investors won't like.

I would also like to admit indirectly funding in scammed projects. I have not funded them with money but with my efforts. XPetroleum and kingcasino and a couple of more I remember. It is good to take some lessons from them and avoid the same in the future. Now a day's I don't participate if I feel something wrong. My decision may go wrong but this is what I think to refrain myself from participating in it.
FTEC project I remember was my first project where I invested a small amount but regret doing so.

Money? -> Never
Promotions? -> several times  ;D ;D

It was so sad when at first getting scammed, but in fact, as long as we really cannot find the scam projects or when following other people only, scams will be around us so easily hunting us  ;D

2017 was the year I lost a lot of money. I lost at that time because of the stupidity of investing in an ICO, which currently the tokens I get are just trash. My advice is to be more careful in investing especially in new projects. the possibility of a scam is quite high. it's better to choose an altcoin that is clear and already has a high market cap than choosing a new altcoin that has the potential to be a scam

I still remember when 2 years ago there were lots of scam bounties, they didn't pay us. But fortunately I didn't put much of my money in the ICO, only attended their events, made promotions. But never mind, it's one of the challenges and risks that must be experienced. That's why I only analyze with my friends to assess whether this bounty pays or not.

I was once invest my money in a scam project which I forget the name. It was around 2017 and most of ICOs brought you money outstanding profit without even spending time for researching. I was blind back then and invested in a project which had low reputation (I made some researches on it after losing my money). They promised a lot of things and the roadmap looked very well. But in the end, I ended up lose my money to the dumpass fake founders. LinkedIn profiles are also fake too. After that incident, I was never made a same mistake again.

It is actually quite easy to spot a fraud, as long as you willing to spend your time to analyze

I also often join scam projects. There are a lot of bounty campaigns of projects that look tantalizing, but in the end I didn't get paid or even that was one of the scam projects. one of the projects that I remember the most is envion. This scam project looks really good and they managed to get money from investors very much. in the end they deceived everyone.

I've lost couple of my accounts when i was 11-13 y.o. so i learned about scammers pretty early. So i never have sent my money or coins to someone. But i don't blame people who've been caught. These guys usually know how to push on people and make them panic.

It's a pretty bad thing, I think every one of us has ever made a mistake. I'm no exception. 2018 was a bad year for me, when I invested too much in ghost projects. And I'm pretty heavy, I have to stop for a while to think about learning my lesson. Around mid-2019, I just started coming back

Of course, by participating in various bounty campaigns, you will most likely be dealing with a scam. There is a lot of him. And of course, you should not place great hopes on this type of cryptocurrency earning.

The more people who are attracted to a prize campaign, the more hype a campaign is, the higher the chances of a scammer coming up, expecting too much of it without further research will make it easier for us to fall into the scam trap.

yup! I am also one of the people who have made that mistake. I have also stopped several times to reflect on the stupidity that I have done, and think as to whether I should come back again or stop here out of frustration.

but i don't want to stop for a long time, i just need to take a break while doing a lot of my own research on some good looking projects before deciding to come back.

Like sharing money for free
I have never join & invest with ICO, not interested at all.
But I noticed from year to year, scammer comes in a new way, they make it as good as possible, follow market trend

Actually not all ICO projects are scam, if we can choose carefully and do research properly, should be able to find a good ICO project.
Although I admit it is very difficult, better like you who avoid joining and investing in ICO. And only investments in top altcoins have
proven to be profitable, I agree every year there are always scammers and always take advantage of newbies who don't have knowledge
and experience in the crypto world. So avoid it if we find projects that promise huge profits in a short time. It's true that scammers always
come up with some new ways, but they usually have the same scam patterns. By offering instant profit, due to the fact that in the crypto world,
it is a long process to be able to generate large profits.

This year, I lost a lot in shittoken, mostly on the Binance Smart Chain network. the desire to be able to make quick profits cost me a lot.
this is a risk that must be faced. For others I suggest to be more careful in choosing tokens that are still new, especially in terms of low liquidity which will be at risk of a scam in a short time

Yes lately the BSC network is at the top, many people use this situation to cheat.
Some people managed to get a big profit from Shittoken, it made some people interested in follow, and we can see results, there are many fooled people
And one more I want to suggest, don't buy based on other people's advice.

I've met a lot of scammers throughout my journey in cryptocurrencies since 2017, and yes there are no such clear glasses to see through the project. Sometimes what we've thought a great project with the great whitepaper, developers, and so on apparently just professional scammers. I was amazed by their effort. I can't even differentiate between the legit and the scam one. However, although not 100% accurate, I started to learn to be wiser in choosing projects. Currently, the scam was just changing the name and form. They would always be those devils in crypto as long as there's no regulation, so let's bear with it and guard ourselves right

I once tricked a Telegram scammer into believing I am going to send him some BTC. He reached out to me telling me about his sick mom, and I fully responded with all empathy you can imagine, but in a tricky way. I asked him how quickly he needs the BTC and he said immediately. I said I can't because I have my hardware wallet at home and won't be home before two days later. That guy bombarded me with messages asking when exactly I will be home. He said he already told his mom help is coming ^^I hope he lied, if not may a lightning bring me judgment! :D

Some time many scammer make you believe with some site show to you about he has much money but can withdraw because not get enough balance, then they give us the ID and password about this account, but never believe with that because they try to make you scam and better looking with other opportunity with your assets,

I, too, participated in those scam schemes' bounty campaigns. I lost track of how many projects I was a member of; they seemed to be very serious when it came to launching projects, but in the end, they were just scams. I put in a lot of money, even though it wasn't a lot of money, between $50 and $100 per project. However, if anything is equal, they will also lose a significant amount of money.

I'm grateful that I have never invested in such scam projects so far. I try to be as careful as possible not to get caught by these people. But I have no doubt that so many people believed in them without having much knowledge about the things.

I have never joined ICO or IEO, it is very difficult to determine which projects are scam or not when lauching in the ICO. now a more practical way for scammers to find victims by IDO or IPO. Indeed, in pencake and uniswap there are a lot of projects that could possibly be a scam, so always be careful ... if you want to invest Just with a small capital

I dont know its a scam or not, but the one and only ico i funded is Ubex.ai and the projects performs so bad until now.
But, i have no option to hold their coins since its ERC20 token and the gas fee is too high to be provided.

Honestly, I never invest or buy tokens from scammers. It is because I will prefer to buy top coins because it is safer than buying new tokens during ICO. And here, we also don't know whether the project will be good and promising or not.

Well, although it may be not experiencing scammed by investment, I think that most of us are scammed with the very big project announcement that is right but in fact, this is only participating in certain programs and no rewards because of scam projects.

I don't invest in fake ico but I follow a lot of bounty on fake new altcoins as a result we waste a lot of time on fake bounties.
between 2017 and 2018, many bounties were fake.

Its also kind of scam, you give free marketing for scammer to market their project better.
People who do bounty must take a look deeper about the project that they will participate unless they will got nothing from it.

Currently I never touch ICO or other fundraising model, because I prefer to buy tokens after listed on the exchange. But my mistake is using centralized exchange that have low trust, so I been loss about 2k equivalent of tokens. This CEX is Cryptopia, they closed and never refund the assets of all their user, that happened in 2019.  For beginner in crypto space should be becarefull to use any CEX and pick out that really has high trust and regulations.

I purchased and contributed there dependent on high Twitter supporters and the dynamic local area in message. I don't recall the name of the undertaking since I just participate. I additionally put resources into a trick ones preceding. Purchased modest stictions that up to this point has a no worth at all in return of Ethereum.

We all are human we all do mistake but if i say truly i never got scammed by anyone as i am person who do all the research deeply then invest in any coin/ any token or don't believe in any person who offer me

Back in 2017 and 2018, I lost some of my money to such scams. Back then I was new to the cryptocurrency sector and I trusted a lot of projects blindly. I could have been more careful about them, but not much can be done now. Anyway, now I have moved on and treat these incidents as learning steps. In every sector, there will be scammers who try to take advantage of the relatively new and inexperienced users. And in this sector the proportion will be higher, because a large percentage of the users are new.

For many years I have invested in many cryptocurrency projects and very often it turned out that some of these cryptocurrency projects turned out to be scammers and unfortunately these scammers took all the investors money into their pockets and they simply disappeared, so lately I am trying not to invest in new cryptocurrency projects because this there is huge a risk to lose your money and I prefer to invest in proven top cryptocurrencies and the profit from this suits me.

I kinda got scammed with my very first investment into crypto which was the ICO of Dimcoin back in 2017. Some known crypto expert back then said it is a great project to invest in and even in this forum the project was talked about and the reception of it was very positive. Thank god i only invested 150$ in it because i wanted to try things out how wallets and transactions work and so on. The ico raised 14M $ if i remember correctly and soon after the ICO the CEO stepped down and then quickly everything fall apart. A few members of the dimcoin team founded another company and i assume they took the money with them. So basically a total loss of funds for everyone that invested and did not sell off quickly once the coins were tradeable.

I've been scammed in investing with a ponzi scheme system. back in 2014 when cloud mining was very crowded and at that time I didn't really realize the worst possibility of cloud mining that they offered. I invested $ 5000 even though my money was fully returned, I still felt cheated by what they offered. if you've ever heard of PBmining. Yes, im talking about that .

I had been here for a couple of years and all those years for being here is that I never try to buy or invest into any form of the ICO, IEO, or STO but most of often was I joined at the bounty campaign where if there is risk that is my time to spend and effort only not the fund come from my pocket.

As what all of the people aware of the scams says in here, don't believe in doublers or anything that would 2x or 3x your sent money overtime.
Watch some scambaiters seeing how they try to crap around these scammers in Youtube. :) It is quite funny.

When I was just starting on this forum where ICO isn't still known to be money grabs then the main scamming modus into those old days where hyips and ponzis.
Yes, its absurd that there are lots of people wayback do still get victimized with those common and obvious scams but those are still not known and not being busted
that much and after that then that's the time where ICO scams do happen and I haven't made myself make out some investment after being scammed lots in
doublers and Ponzi and that's really a lesson learned for me. If we do make out calculations on how much I do lost then that would be a significant one.

2017 and 2018 were the worst years for me because at that time I didn't know much about crypto and always considered all projects is real, so at that time I invested money in several projects at the same time, some made profit and I also lost money in several projects. as you said, mistakes made me learn and be more careful in determining projects before investing
because too many scammers made me to invest in ICO, until now I'm only joined IEO on binance

If the offer is something too good to be true, best to skip it and not to invest any amount either time or money.

Those scammers are rounding around trying to find someon who will bite their offer and get victimized by the

system scammers have, be aware and always put your guards up, don't give any reason for scammers to penetrate you.

So far, it is zero.  ;D  But I always try to be careful about especially new projects in the market. Because there are really many frauds out there waiting for their victims. I recommend all the people to be as aware as possible. It is really too easy to lose money in this market.

Maybe at first what are they intention is not to scam people, but when people think they are not follow their whitepaper and change what is the money from investor used for, then the project turn to be disaster, dumped and then dead project. And i am buy their ICO and then lose much of my money. Mostly i wrongly pick in an ICO project and rarely trapped or scammed by HYIP/ Ponzi sites.

Started late 2017 and made a few mistakes

- Hashflare cloud mining: lost around 500$ buying SHA256 contracts, profitability quickly decreased until they stopped mining because "not profitable anymore" and my balance never got over the minimum to cashout, even people that did claim their accounts were deleted when they tried.

- VIVO and PAC masternodes: not really a scam, but I started mining and thought masternodes were a great idea, quickly lost over 90% of my investment.
- VIVO doesn't exist anymore lost 1-2k there.
- I sold PAC (Paccoin now renamed Pac Global) at a 3k loss (80%) in february this year. Fun story is 2 weeks later it pumped so hard I would have made 10-15k instead.

- Avoided the Cryptopia scam in 2018 someone else previously mentionned. I went there to trade DOGE, but luckily I cashed out before they disappeared.

- FOMO'd in a few shitcoins this year with BTC profits, but very small amounts I was ready to loose, and I did exactly that! Mainly Elongate & SHIB.

I never put my money in the traps of scammers, I gained experience by seeing fraudulent cases that my friends have been exposed to, Everyone should be careful before investing in any new project. This topic is useful so that we can see what happened with others and so that we do not repeat the same mistake.

This post drew my attention and am heart broken though I don't regret that much anymore cause I know in crypto a lot of people get scammed every day so I don't see it as a shame.
I added my money to an investment, it was 3x coin or something like that but the project was to give back times 3 of what you invested with, base on the hype and some good testimonies from other investors I decided to go in but because I wasn't fully assured I just gave in a thousand dollars and at the end I saw the group tagged on telegram as scam and no way to chat them up so I just left. Some days are bad we need to wise up in crypto market.

After the 2017 bull run, I invested in a project called spotcoin. There was also a serious fomo and serious work at that time. But then there was a change of CEO and the project was suspended. Although they still say that the project will continue, they are neither active on telegram channels nor on any social media. They also did not refund the money.

On the other hand, when we look at the bull run of this period, we see that fraud has increased more. Especially dog coins have hurt many people and continue to do so. After this, many projects with trillions of supplies on the BSC network come out and then escape from the market by throwing rugpull. You have to be very careful.

I experienced many fraud investments in most of the projects that i invested my money. Back when the first bull run of cryptocurrencies in 2017. Some of the investments that i have, i gained profits but most i lose my money because many are scam projects. But its only ok with me because i know that investing in cryptocurrencies is risky.

There's only few, this happened when I was just a newbie in crypto. Mostly of them are hyip and ponzi scheme wherein you can earn easily with huge ROI. Thats how I spend my capital during early times and realize that mistakes after losing my money.

I think its the problem of me as a newbie that I didnt conduct a research before putting my money in that kind of investment.  I thought its a reliable way since many investors are also promoting such especially on social media.

I dont have any bad experience in ICO because mostly of my coins came from bounties as a reward. Thus even the project didnt succeed, only my time and effort are wasted for promoting them for months.

There are a lot of successful ICO projects in 2017-2018 but there are also tons of scam projects. Back in that time i was investing like 100-200 USD into scam projects name ATROX, lending system just like many projects that time. That was also my first year in crypto so i don't have many experience yet. It's okay to be scammed at first because it will give you an experience and become more careful for next investment

Yes, a lot of people are being scammed all the time and I have only experienced it once. Can’t remember the name of the project , but I was still newbie as of the time it happened. But, the money I lost wasn’t too much, just a little amount of money.

Although I didn’t understand the cryptocurrency exactly as of then, I was still very careful with my money and didn’t want to risk losing everything, so I go for little investments until I am sure that something is legit before I start making bigger investments. I think that experience kind of made me to be more wiser, and since then I have not fallen for any scam again.

I invested in KICK, REAL. These two projects still exist but the return is quite low compared to the amount of money I have spent. I also invested more than 5000$ in Oyster, then the CEO of the project printed more tokens and dumped them. The project has become a dead project. I failed in investing, it can be said that the money made so far has been blown away.

There truly is nothing wrong with admitting that you were scammed.  I think first and foremost it's a valuable teaching lesson and it's important to share your experiences being that you want to make sure others don't fall in the same fate as you did.  I personally have never been scammed with anything finance, but as a financial advisor I've been trained to spot scams..so it comes easy to me, but I'm well aware of how difficult it is to spot for most people.  The biggest scam that I spent the most time with is hands down bitconnect.  By spending time with, I do mean warning others of the scam, and trolling the hell out of those working for bitconnect. 

If I would be able to count on how many scammers I've funded then probably it may exceed about 10 projects. Way back then when I am still a newbie here in cryptocurrency I've invested in different projects such as ICO when that ICO was still boom in year 2017 in which there's a lot of projects who are having an initial coin offering and I'll be able to put my money there and some of the projects that I've been invested we're scam but still, I've hit some good projects who pays really well and due to that experiences I've built my own knowledge here in cryptocurrency and avoid those projects that look like a scam.

browsing through this thread, I am now thankful that I haven't experienced being scammed for where I invest. Or the time just haven't come yet. But I am expecting this to occur in some time. Though, personally, I want to experience one or two (just please, not a big scam) for me to have the knowledge and ideas how this works first hand.

What I believe this industry won't help you from others experience news. None of us can take the scam taste without realizing it. Actually, now I'm not brave enough to buy a coin from the ICO. So many legit projects aren't waiting or dependent on ICO. But that's how we are providing our profit for exchange. Even in some cases, investors are losing their dominance from the new projects. This is the reason that I wasn't hunted by scammers.

Judging by my notes, the total amount of my losses is about 0.2 bitcoin (in 2017-2018 prices), invested in various dubious projects. Someone scammed right away, someone else pretended that he was alive, someone created the appearance of active work ... In fact, I did not lose, I paid for the training course "How not to invest." Definitely worth the money :)

Would be about $500 for pure scams. I have lost nearly the double with wrong address or lost private keys/mnemonic. It all sums to improving yourself. These scammers feeds till you are not cautious or smart enough. Be smart, think twice before sending, using a wallet or accessing it from different devices. Don't download what you are not sure of. Keep your crypto device and or browser separate from your regular using device or browsing browser.

Actually, at the end of 2017 and early 2018 it was still very good to invest at that time, but entering the middle of 2018 to the end of 2018, almost the average project experienced a scam and many people suffered heavy losses.

0

Thank god I didn't invest on such projects. They looked pretty promising at that date when I was new but the risk they offer and the risk of getting scammed by unknown people are really high.
I feel bad for those early investors back then on ICO and because of that we are getting smarter when such cases happen again with new format and scheme to trick people.

I purchased and contributed there dependent on high Twitter devotees and the dynamic local area in message. I don't recall the name of the task since I just participate. My portfolio has gotten useless, and I was tricked by many trick projects. For sure an exercise discovered that we may pick the set up and potential ones instead of facing a challenge to those recently projects.

As long as I'm in the crypto world I'm grateful I've never been hit by a scammer,
and I always avoid buying ICOs and even IEOs, I used to want to buy IEOs on Binance,
but my intentions were canceled because the rewards that will be given are very small,
so it doesn't matter if you buy IEO on good exchanges, I just remind you not to buy IEOs, IDOs or ICOs on bad exchanges

I can still almost remember ICOs getting widely discussed in here, but I guess it now started to disappear after the year 2017, due to how many scams emerged in the market making the investor nope'd out of it. :D
Trends are gonna arrive and scammers will follow along as well.

I'm guilty to a few of them, mostly back in the pump and dump era of 2015 - 2016. Back then, pump and dumps were extremely easy to execute since there are no regulations and there are no officials monitoring market activities. Also, not much money is around so we take even a few thousand dollars profit and then abandon the project entirely and move on to a new coin with a new name but entirely the same code. It lasted for quite a while before I left that particular way of trading and just bought and hodl.

Way too many, way way too many, but thankfully not lately. I have invested into things back in the day called "cloud miners" which meant that you bought a miner that was run by other people, it was a stupid idea to begin with but they convinced me that instead of making money gradually, this way they made a ton of money upfront by selling it, and they buying more, and then still charged you maintenance anyway so they would make money that way, seemed like a reasonable business idea but almost none of that made any money for me at all in the end, they "made money" in the sense that I recouped some of my investment but not all of them, mining tech went faster than I could purchase so my hash rate basically never allowed me to break even and eventually the maintenance was more expensive than the money it made and hence I stopped doing it.

I lost thousands of dollars to it when I first started and if I just bought bitcoins with that, I would have made millions by now.

When 2018 has entered, the scams were a lot and that's when it started to die. Good riddance for those ICOs because many of them were actually scams and made to scam people because they saw the success from it.

True.

Despite there's now a change in the trend, they'll still make a way to scam investors money.

During those time there were potential projects as well as scams. At some point more ICO reached the market, and the bull market gave good return out of it unlike the project. Further most went as a scam. Myself experienced losing fund on a multiplier scheme when I was new into bitcoin. Then onwards I prefer hodling than trying some unwanted things.

unfortunately I have been cheated many times, I have already lost money with ICO (I was anxious because it was a project about games and it seemed to me that the project had a good future, but unfortunately one of the project developers stole money and made the price of the coin drop I also lost money with a lot of altcoins that after being listed on the exchanges I found out that the creators were scammers who were creating shitcoins, I lost money. this crypt market can be cruel, there are people who have no feeling, all they want is money and they do anything to get money, create shit projects just to get money

I haven't funded any scammer yet but I always am anxious about this whenever I start searching for new and promising projects. I've been gaining experience day by day. I've realized that having a good experience really helps.

That's how crypto is happening right now, it's almost impossible to tell which ones are scammers and which are legitimate.
As for losing money in crypto, even though it's not too big, it's almost certain that everyone has experienced a victim of scamers if they invest in hype altcoins. the greater the hype that occurs in the market, the greater the chance for scammers to get prey.

You only need to avoid suspicious projects, because usually scammers are always in unclear projects, so you don't have to worry about that as long as you don't easily believe in new projects that give a lot of sweet promises.

worst for me was campaigning hard for these projects. joining there campaign projects here on bitcointalk and also investing. hoping that the reward will be huge but unfortunately, it turns out the projects was a scam. the alpha mining did promotions here and people fall for that. one of the reasons some projects conducted marketing is to create an outreach and then, they dissappear.

Do we in the same way as you were before? Only a few new altcoins are offering a few thousand dollars even now. Should we expect more than before because the CMC is now over trillions. Recently I haven't funded any scammers, but unintentionally I helped them. Sometimes I start to support some scam new projects, but now I won't do that because we learn from our lessons.

I have so many experiences with fake projects putting up a campaign here in the forum and that’s my worst investment since I work for it and invest my time but I ended up into nothing. Good thing that we have so many concern people here in the forum and every time they see fake or scam project, they share it to the public.

Did the scams have founders known in the space or where the founders hiding ? If they are hiding, it's obv a bad sign even if they are hiding to protect themselves legally.

It's no surprised that ICOs are being compared to NFTs of right now. It's just a pump and dump, quick to make money scheme.
I compared ICOs and NFTs as digital tulips.
Just stick with the basics: Bitcoin, Ethereum and Binance Coin.

too many that I can't count them, lol
when I first started with crypto, I was still a layman, I thought all projects were convincing, it turned out that I was wrong, there were a lot of scammers, I gave some of my savings to them and had time to give up hope, but I never gave up and learned how to choose a good project. starting from seeing the team and reading the road map

There was a project I invested in 2018 thinking that the project gonna be a massive one I invested some of my my time and efforts in it by participating in their bounty campaign managed by a Sr.member of the forum after more than two months of promotion , a lot of investors invested in their ICO Lo and Behold the developers and the manager went AWOL and turned scam all my efforts was in futility and funds gone it was a very painful experience while expecting a massive profits thinking that the project is real however I have to move.

Yes, there were potentials. Though if you would imagine, how many would be willing to find those "potential projects"?
It is like finding diamond covered with a loads of shit. It is a mess and might not be worth finding one in exchange of proper hygiene. :D

personally i am never scammed in any projects, but truely i loss some of my initial investment in shitproject. for example i am invest $100 and before its be scam project , i am sell it early and only left 50% or less. totally loss in scam project fortunately never, but in bounty campagin several times i had it

I am avoiding people or groups whom I don't know that involves money or donations. I am bad at part of not trusting others on that way but there are so many people that used different ways just to scam others. I have earned real money in crypto without involving real money so it becomes my standard on everything I want to join to earn.

That night I was blinded by greed which cost me coins.  I followed a project that promised a lot of profit.
 I'm interested because their tweeter has a lot of followers.  Through this account, the fraudster held a prize event, where by sending a coin to an address, it was promised that it would be multiplied in a few minutes. For example, if you send 1 coin, you will get 2 coins.  I didn't realize that the scammer had managed to trick me.

For new users, it takes a lot of time to get adjusted to the realities of cryptocurrency market. A lot of them are looking for quick profits and they believe that all the social media propaganda is true. And one thing I have noticed about the scam projects is that they advertise themselves really nicely. Blind trust, combined with greed makes sure that the noobs find themselves in a sticky situation later. But the trick is not to repeat the same mistake again. Once you get scammed, take it as a learning opportunity and be more careful.

since I got to know crypto, I have saved a lot of money in scam places, and most of it is in investment places such as HYIP sites, minning, and also ICOs. it happened in 2016 to 2019. however, for now I only keep my money in popular coins to minimize the risk of scam, and price changes.

Well, if you have a penchant of telling all of your stories especially your financial journey to strangers then be my guest. Do you want to give out some financial information to someone who you don't know and felt close since you are both in the same Bitcoin forum slash community of people who are all Bitcoin and altcoin investors. Word of advise who wants to get rich and be successful in crypto, there is no need for you to give out such financial information to anybody whether it is an innocent thread of story telling or possibly something sinister. Story tell all you want at your own risk.

There are some scam projects that look convincing, at first I wanted to put money there because it looks professional, but after I followed the advice in the https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=83.0 section, then I canceled and it turns out some projects proved to be scams.

i've fund some scam projects in a few years ago when ICO is in hype. maybe four of five fake projects.
i don't have any experience back then, so i just follow the hype. i even read their paper carefully, but still i got scammed.

In the past, I funded quite a lot of spam projects and at that time I was less thorough in analyzing projects and some only followed the advice of some friends, but since that incident I have been more careful and until now I have never invested in a scam project

it was a very bad experience, stuck up to 5x. That's how it is.. a project that looks convincing is sometimes just an illusion.

 I was also stuck once, I panicked about buying because at that time I was still a newbie and ico was hype. I joined ico without analyzing the project, and that's where my funds ran out.

Since then I have always rethought to put the funds, and prefer not to invest directly. I prefer to join bounties and competitions to profit from crypto, this is the way I can handle the most losses.

I have had a fair share of having experiences of being scammed, through which due to my lack of diligence and impulsiveness. These experiences happened inside and outside of crypto, and these have taught me hard-learned lessons to not trust easily and always be doubt first then research or even ask for proofs and all.

I am glad to withdraw my ICO investment before the team running away with the collected funds. The only small cost was the withdrawal fee on their platform but I didn't let the scammers rob my investment. Checking team members on social media and their roadmap,whitepaper is are not enough steps to protect our funds from scammers.

That is why I hesitate to invest in the dead projects before checking the all details that can affect the profitability of the investment. The anonymous teams can be frustrating if something goes wrong and we look for someone to ask a refund. Professional scammers are hard to detect and everything is designed to take our money. After reaching a specific investment pool, the scammers run as fast as they can. Victims only cry on the public forums and look for help, sad but true, unfortunately.

no problem we loss our fund for tranfers fee rather than lose all of money due scammed in fake projects. team background should be the first thing we need to check. avoid anonymous team should be our priority for investing , most of them only build short term project and will not survive for long term.

maybe for the year 2021 alone, I think the total loss that I experienced might be around $1000 for various projects on uniswap and pancakeswap, that's the risk I'm ready to take, but behind that there is a big profit, maybe above $ 10k for me at the moment.

Were ICOs really a thing back in 2016? I just thought they were like 2017-ish when they got popular as I saw a lot of ICO-related threads here back in those years or I might just be blind because I joined crypto that late as well.
I wouldn't be surprised since they started disappearing already the following year due to scams.

rarely join presale/ico.

The last "rug" that I can remember was $XVC or $VNL cash..Some pow coin with crazy dev. The dev just left abruptly in the middle of a project.

The price nuke from 30kish sat to 2k sats. Not much back then, but yeah the coins basically die after the dev left. The community takeover is not succeed.

that is the weakness of ICO investment. the very high risk we will lose our money because the developer left the project. and even though they are on the market, it doesn't guarantee the asset will have an interest. The community on the market won't help anything if the developer leaves the project. that means, the project dies.

noo dude..this vnl/xvc not an ico..it's a pow coin where everyone mine their own coin with no dev token.

But yeah if the dev left, there will be volatility in the price, more likely to see the coin fall off the cliff.

On another note, dogecoin dev also left many years ago... that palmer guy...but the coins still thriving from time to time, especially with elon musk involved.

I didn't lose much of the money I had to spend, I only ever lost a total of $100 while I was in cryptocurrency. I am more often fooled by my sometimes unpaid work. Although I don't spend money, but it's really a waste of time, but it's a risk.

Now fraud is rare because payments are always there, but fraud is now more about throwing away tokens when hunters have received their bounty payments, which can be done by investors who have bought tokens in ICO programs at very low prices.

I only spend a small amount of money on these scammers but the amount of time and effort is very frustrating some of the tokens I invested are through time and effort, it's also like investing money because you have to spend hours just to promote these projects through bounty campaign, I lose counts on how many projects I put all my money and efforts, there's so many of them and many more because there's no guaranty on bounty campaign, only those coins that are already in the market that you are guaranteed to make a profit.

I didn't send money to anybody. But i've lost my Steam account when i was 12 y.o. on website that was promising me free games. And few years later i wanted to trade my stuff in steam too, i've sent my inventory but that guy didn't send me money. But i didn't need those stuff so i wasn't sad.

And after this i've been really careful with any suspicious sites or messages on the web and didn't fall in any scam.

I've lost $300 couple of years ago. I've seen an ad in twitter that they can double my money but instead i've lost it all. I know, it sounds stupid but i'm glad that when i've entered the crypto world later i've been more careful since then.

Those funds that these scammers have scammed from me are forgettable compared to what I made from investing from the right project I am very quick to move forward when it comes to investing, I always invest what I can afford to lose, it's a learning process that we all go through as we mature as investors.

Based on My experience is not investing in scam ICOs but I followed the bounty campaign at that time. At the beginning I followed my bounty several times and got a project scam where I had followed it for a few weeks and it turned out to be a scam. It was very disappointing and it happened to me several times. I made this a lesson to be more careful in following the bounty. And now to participate in a bounty, I have to understand the project very well and always follow its progress well so that I can find out more about the project. I hope to get more legit projects.

it means you make more than you lose. it is very good work.
it's really really bad to see how more and more scammers are. and it makes me more careful in choosing a new project.
in the last year, I lost my $100 in the BCNEX project. looks paid and normal, but after that, they disappear.

The first time I lost money on internet was when I lost $600 in 2008 or 2009 (back then it was a big amount). I had joined an affiliate marketing scheme and they promised unbelievable returns if I purchase one of their "premium plans". I paid the amount, and they vanished with my money. First entered cryptocurrency sector in 2012. And the next year, I lost a majority of my coins to one of the crypto-investment scams. And even after this incident, there were 2-3 occasions where I lost smaller number of coins. Anyway, I guess now I have learnt my lesson.

I  have funded some money in 2 ICOs in the year 2018 and got a loss as coins could not perform according to my expectation but after that, I did not fund any project simply participate in bounty campaigns and get coins for the work done. I was a newbie that time and enticed by bonus schemes so like this newbies will trap again & learned a bitter lesson like us but I must say not everybody scammed some make money as well.

There had been a lot of hype I had joined in, especially during this bull market where tons of tokens were pumping and some even grew to thousand folds if you have invested early. I have no luck on joining such crowdfunding I always end up investing on rug prohects. There is a time I invested almost 2 BNB and it my money went down 90%.

The crypto world is now full of scammers. And many scams are constantly coming up with ICO, IEO, IDO, DEFI and scams with us. I have been scammed a few times and lost a lot of my money.

I didn't really lose money to any ICO back then because I believe I invested in very few of them and I was always lucky about the one I invested in but I did lose money to one project called Traw/XTraw back then when the Dev was looking for support to move the project forward and a couple of us following the project then volunteered to help with the money s/he was looking for and after a while, the Dev just left with the money without continuing with the project and also lost money to an exchange too, Fedlio, that turned out to be a Scam exchange.

Most of the people in this community didn't really help some scam project with their money instead they wasted their time to promote those scam projects which is really annoying because they don't even know it because they've been fooled as well. When you look at their roadmap and telegram group, you will say that they are the real deal when they don't even have the resource nor the companies they said they being partnered with. Most of the time they got caught with their fake profile pics on Linkedin but sometimes they managed to hide completely until they gathered enough money to escape.

I have never experienced investing in an ico project so I don't feel disadvantaged by losing assets, but I feel aggrieved by the time wasted because some of the bounties that I participated in were trash projects and were not paid. it only costs my time not my asset

that's because you are not an ICO investor. another story if you are an ICO investor, surely you have lost a lot of your money because you can also trust the bounty project that you support and end up being a scam. it means you also have a poor analysis in choosing a project.

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Nowadays it is difficult to distinguish whether a project is real or a scam, this is what makes us selective in crypto investments, I have invested in ICOs since 2015 and I have learned hundreds, even though I have invested about 30 ICOs, and of all I have found about 20 scam.

I have absolutely no experience in investing in ICO projects, even I don't have the ability to analyze a successful ICO, what should I do??. Well, that's why for me it's a big risk and that's why I don't participate in the ICO Project.

Not all the ICOs are bad and many of the ordinary investors became millionaires as a result of their involvement with the ICOs. For example, when the Ethereum ICO came out in 2014, the price per coin was $0.30. And the current Ethereum exchange rate is $1,877 per coin, which represents almost 6000 times return from the ICO price. Similarly, for Tron (TRX), the ICO price was $0.0019 per coin. The current exchange rate is $0.0554. I can give dozens of such examples. But the sad fact is that more than 99% of the current ICOs are scam. 

Several ICOs and IEOs like TKO and SFP for example, have given me an advantage, I was interested in this project before both listing on the exchange and doing research to get good details.
Several other ICOs such as Nauticus Exchange in 2018 have made everyone nervous, at that time I also invested and it turned out that the project failed and was not continued.

Some time ago I invested a small amount of animal coins,Because I found out that he only relied on hype to get people to invest, without his own team skills， but fortunately, before the price dropped or even the project team ran away, I sold the tokens in my hand. This is really lucky.

Someone invested in Bitstamp when they launched a crowdfunding campaign ?

The issue with coins that rely solely on hype is that ordinary users will never know when the prices will go up. When some celebrity such as Elon or Snoop Dogg publishes a tweet about this coin, it will suddenly go up by 5x or 10x. The issue here is that most of the users will get to know about the coin only at this point. They will rush to put their money in it, at inflated prices. And once the hype subsides, the coin will go back to its previous levels, and the users will be stuck with these loss making coins/tokens. Now they need to wait for the next hype cycle, to sell these coins (and that may never happen).

Relate my self to this topic, actually I am a victim of scammed online betting just this july 12. The Scammed online gambling flatform is called "Muyan66". They get billions of pesos in all around the world. It is important to do a entered research from internet, my mistake is im only relay of what my friends say wothout knowing it. Lesson learn do a research always to avoid lossing funds.

I have not put any money on coins that become worthless only my effort as a bounty hunter no regret on my part, bounty hunting and investing is a gamble we can compare it to a box of chocolate, you'll never what you are going to get, even projects that looks legit can go down the drain and small projects can become huge.

Not to be fooled, but I believed too much in the community's bullshit when it was my first time investing in a very innovative project.
I bought 50k ETN during the ICO and at that time it was $0.01. The ICO campaign managed to sell all the coins allocated for sale and managed to get around $40 million.

When listing on an exchange, the price went up so fantastically, I even bought another for the equivalent of $500. With the hope that the price will increase many times, then I try to forget it and want to open it 1 year after I bought it. I was very surprised, because friends in the community said, ETN will touch $0.5 next year, when I try to check the wallet every month, what happens is the price drops to $0.01.

It was such a shameful experience that it was the first time I spent money on investing in crypto, but I'm currently laughing about it and it's an unforgettable story

I think those that are funding clear scam projects should be held responsible for what they are doing because they are doing it on the off chance that they earn a lot because these scam projects promise a lot of return on your money and people know that it could be a scam but they invest anyway because its too lucrative to miss.

for me projects that i discoverd in the bounty section. i can't convince you because it is totally a waste of time. although i partake in bounties but i know what is involved. it is just a waste of time. reason is this. the project developers are all greedy. they use hunters to gain attention and then dump hunters when it is time for payment. also they sometimes swap into new tokens to destroy rewards earn by hunters in other to please the real destroyers.(investors).

Unfortunately two times. One is ICO and another one is local crypto to fiat trader. That was my first investment on ICO, and i got scammed on my first try. And I got scammed in local market for my over confidence about him.

Take a look at the bounties and you can see that they are run by the same people over and over and I think the bounty managers should be held responsible for this and there should be negative tags given to them for being involved as it is very obvious that they are scamming people and continue to do so under new alias.

Personally, I am not at all.
I lost money through my own stupidity, carelessness, and so on, but I am glad that I have never invested in a scam.
Although there were times when I sent them to the wrong network.

This issue of scams is one hell of an experience, and most times you can hardly tell on which project that will exit scam or the one run by scammers. I think remember there was a project whose team were active, working hard and so on, the project got listed, a little working products and the price was good and as with some projects, the team started paying less attention, and gradually left the project or exited scam. Actually cases like this, are somewhat frequent which is why a lot of people hardly holds most new coins for long, they always dump and watch from the sidelines to see how far the team can go, this will make them evaluate the project and decide if it's good for long term or not.
Also, one need to be very careful of those who hype new projects, a very good number of them don't always last, because once the hype fades, the project dies.

There are lots of scammers in crypto industry. I cant remember how much i have given these scammers but the more i give them , the more i grow strong and more wise. Majority of the new project that floods the market often end as scam .  Its just like playing game , its not easy to come across genuine project nowadays . I will only advice newbies who want to invest in crypto to get investment advisor to prevent them from losing too much money to scammers

You are lucky to choose the right asset for your investment. bitcoin and ethereum will be very safe for the long or short term.
I myself did not participate during the popularity of the ICO. but I followed on binance IEO. the requirements seem very strict as you have to be a ticketed BNB holder to take part in the IEO.
from there I did not lose

Have been done this road a couple of times, I think even with doing all the research a project might likely turn out to be scam if the owner is not an honest person, I think almost everyone in crypto have also had this experience, nothing is too sure in crypto especially when the team is Anon.
This happens frequently now, especially on pancakeswap rug pulls news are all over the place, safe to say that 80% of all the bsc projects are shitcoins.
It's probably cumdogerocket  :D

I personally also had a similar case but not with cumdogerrocket but with Poosi coin, mozik coin and Cryption Network. they are on the BinanceSmartChain blockchain. some of which are coin memes that Dev left behind and are very concerning while stuck in RUG :D. it was a bad experience though not in bulk.

I have lost a lot of money in different defi-projects. But I can’t say that they were scams, as I consider that a scam is when the devs deceive you (Rugpool, additional functions of mint, impossibility to sell your tokens etc). But I don’t have such experience.  One project I invested in was hacked. Others were unpopular, so people didn’t invest in them, and, as a result, my investment devalued.

In cryptocurrency, just two. I was looking for a quick moonshot messing around in things I shouldn't have. I made 10% my first trade, 25% my second trade, lost 20% my third trade, and lost everything my fourth trade when I realized they made it impossible to sell, only buy. Luckily it was very small amounts, and I learned very valuable lessons.

When I was a newbie I invested in some projects, I can't remember how many projects that I invested but most of them were turned to scam. I never research the project that time I just put the money and wait to make profit, I learned my lessons. Now the meme coins are rising so dyor first most of the meme are scams.

One scam that I had was called WhiteTeethSwap. I saw that it would launch soon and I decided to buy their token as soon as possible. But I had to leave at the time when it happened, so I asked my younger brother to buy it in my wallet. But he is not into crypto, he didn’t know about slepage (and it was huge I guess), so I received very few of their token and then they also decreased by 1000000 times, so it is more my bad of course.