Bitcoin Forum

Hey everyone,

How do you verify that a projects funds will not be stolen by the devs? Many projects hold ICO's or some other sort of sale to raise money for development and many have turned out to be scams where the dev steals the money.

What are you looking for to verify that they won't run away with the cash?

Any ideas on how a project can build trust with the community on this topic?

What would you like to see DAO projects do in the future that would help build trust and make sure funds are secure from theft?

You can check their contract address, most of the projects got their contract address so that's part of checking if the funds were there and secured by the development team. But why are you making that sure that it's safe? you should always be active on their telegram or any means of communication with their community because they're the ones that will answer on how you'll check if the funds of the project are there. There would always be a way to contact them and ask your question directly. For example, what's the current project that made you ask this question? you contact them and this question directly to them.

I am asking about projects in general.

Many projects will raise money for development by selling tokens. There have been many projects that will sell tokens and run away with the money.

I want to know what the community would like to see changed in this topic to prevent this from happening in the future.

More public development teams for sure but is there anything else a project can do to build trust?

my reference is their community, a project with an active community will give us accurate information about everything we need. whenever something went wrong, there would always be someone who was critical of it and brought it up to the community. so to see if the dev project is good or bad is very easy. just look at their community.

Just a continuous development and update to their community. I guess that would suffice to build the public trust that they need to their own community. It's something that other projects don't know how to handle because they're all thinking about building from zero to hero but they are forgetting their very foundation and that is the trust of the people. Without such, they'll never move on and cannot get the success that they need respectively with their roadmap and what's on it with their road maps.

I was able to trust few projects that use third-party audit websites to get verified like CertiK for example, it's been a very good idea all this while as I've never seen any audited project getting scammed

Your request is difficult because you can't read the minds of people to know what is there but you can try to limit your risk by not giving your money to new project. If a project is already existing or is having partnership with some big conglomerate, then it is possible they might have some limitations of not running away with your money.

I think thats pretty hard to guarantee! that all results will always good in the end. Because in crypto everything is possible, If the development team has absolute control to all of those funds, I believe that the risk is even higher, But if the token sale was made on a centralized platform like Binance that the arrangement was made in good terms like an extra level of funds security, team KYC and all other kinds of preventions, from unauthorized access of those funds, IMO, I believe It will be much safer if the token sale was made on a centralized platform like Binance compare to DExes. Just my opinion.

Unfortunately, we can never be sure that the project will not turn into a scam. However, we can reduce this risk by doing good research. For me, the most important information that I verify to check credibility is of course the Whitepaper and the past (career) of dev team members. If the developers are anonymous, I stay away from such a project. Buying project tokens that are anonymous is like giving money to a stranger on the street.

The only way to be completely sure this is not going to happen is if the developers accept to use an independent escrow that is trusted by the community and they accept that the funds are not going to be released until they reach certain milestones in the development of the project.

Now this is not very common as many developers do not want to be constrained by someone else when it comes to the access of the funds as they do not know exactly how much something could cost or if it is going to take more time to develop a portion of project, but as far as I know this is the only way to be 100% sure this is not going to happen.

There’s always a risk on every project but we can avoid to landed on a bad one if we this do before investing, having your own research is a must even though there’s no guarantee but at least you do your part. There’s no way to ensure that the project fund is safe, it is under the control of developer and it’s up to them if they’ll scam you or they’ll use their money to improve their project. If you are in doubt with the new project, you can always buy the top choices.

You are giving money in their hands and expect them to keep it safe?

It becomes their money once you send it to them so its their decision whether they want to keep it safe for the development program of involving in exit scamming but the project team members revealed their original identity then they have fewer chances to run away so invest in the project only if devs are trustworthy and experienced.

There is no special technique to find out whether our money is safe or not, we are just speculating because whatever they present can be like real, but what I usually do is always monitor the rating ratings from third parties such as ICO ratings.

You cannot completely verify what the developers would do in the long run. Especially if the project is some kind of non-existent and popping up like mushrooms out of nowhere, then you could expect that this is just a scam and could run away with your hard-earned money. It's not going to be always the case but you need to make sure and see if the project that you are investing in is legitimate and has actual plans in the long run.

Theft would be another case like stealing your computer or hardware wallet. You cannot control what the developers are going to do with the personal stash that they got from the coin itself. As long as you are listed they can swap the amount and "trade" your asset to the scam coin.

Basically ICOs are like that. based on trust and there are no guarantees, because most of the purchases are directly transferred through the smart contract address. As a potential investor, you must know clearly what you are doing. they can make promises but you have to have a strong analysis before doing investment like ICO. because even if they not run away, you might be only get their token which also may not have value.

If you want to invest safely, follow these steps:

1. Take a look at the project team
It takes a team that is experienced enough to be able to carry out this vision. Realizing a vision requires a team that has high credibility and quality so that the idea can be implemented properly.

How do you know if the team is experienced enough and has high credibility and quality? You can view their LinkedIn profile, where all of their employment and education history is listed.

2. Road Map
Consider whether a road map looks realistic or not, is it too ambitious? Is it possible? It would be better if a road map was started several years ago.|

3. Marketing
Hiring a marketing professional can increase the confidence of investors to invest in the company. This is one of the added values ​​that has a big impact. Marketing methods are also not limited by writing articles on famous websites, airdrops, bounties and videos.

4. Use of Coins/Tokens
Each Coin or Token has a different function, having a Coin/Token does not mean you have shares in the Coin/Token company, but there are some ICOs or projects that are already running that have a token function that distributes dividends to their Coin/Token holders. Note that the function of the Coin/Token greatly affects the prospects of the ICO

Well, I think the best strategy is to try and do your due diligence before investing in any project, it's the investors duty to do some internal and external verification on the team he's going to be handing he's money over to, trusting is not easy and if you are the type that trust people easily, then you are likely to have a lot of disappointments than those who don't trust easily, the investor should do a proper research and make sure the project is genuine at least, to some reasonable extent, if he or she is not sure, then better wait for the coin or token to get listed on an exchange, then he or she can buy from there, and sometimes, it's even better to wait and buy them from exchanges as they tend to go lower in price ones listed as most projects are over priced in ICO or IEO.

Well, there are actually quite a lot of ways to really be able to verify a project's legitimacy for you to be able to make sure that your funds are completely safe from being robbed by a project's developing team. The only thing that these ways would require are your diligence. If you have the proper diligence, you can easily find out whether a project is bad, good or great. To make things easier, I'll suggest a few ways for you to follow:
1. Check the identities of every significant person in the developing team.
2. Check the community under the project.
3. Check the management capabilities of the developing team:
     - Community management.
     - Marketing management.
4. Project development; punctuality in following the steps written in the roadmap.
5. Lastly, transparency towards the community.

While these steps may seem like a hassle to actually do, I suggest that you really execute these steps because there is no other thing that is more important than protecting your hard earned capital. Do not let others take advantage of you.

Though may not be full proof, I hope it helps. :)

Checking the project developers and the person who is in affiliate with the project should be your first move before putting something on a project. A project roadmap is also important.  Given the circumstances that the research you have made satisfied you and you put some money into it, Checking its contract address should do the trick on checking if the project's funds are stolen or scammed.

Anything can still be twisted on the process of acquiring funds while the project is still being run. Even we have already verified the developers or the team behind a specified project we are rooting with, we still cannot assure if they will stay into that attitude until the aim of the project have already been satisfied. But qualities that most good projects must do possess includes having a decent developer team behind it, a roadmap to see the progress and plans of the team towards the project and how it will turn out before, during and after the project have been commenced.

Speaking of roadmaps, I always make it a benchmark whether or not a project is worth following because they can be proven in terms of discipline and timeliness of the schedule they make if they deny it for various reasons that don't make sense, if found like that, I better go and find another

this is indeed quite difficult, even a really solid looking team and a well-developed project is no guarantee it will last long. Recently I was stuck at Merlin, a project in the BSC network that is developing very well, there is farming and staking, there is also a lottery that attracts a lot of people, but for some reason it crashes and the team says that their system has been hacked, even though it has passed an audit from several institutions Trusted.
I also lost more than 85%. it is a risk, like it or not we have to accept it.

From crypto I learned, let alone an anonymous team, a clear team whose members can end up being a scam. even my friends who have a lot of experience can still get caught in a scam. so from the start, prepare funds that at any time can indeed be lost and you can accept it.

Dozens of new cryptocurrencies are launched every month, and with these new tokens and coins comes a series of initial coin offerings (ICOs). In anticipation of the hype, we need to be vigilant, which is the most important thing by looking at some of the categories that have been mentioned and discussed in this forum, not only that we also have to be able to assess ico projects, although it seems clear, ICOs and cryptocurrencies with opportunities The greatest for success are those who have the fundamental structure to outlast their competitors.

When it comes to safety of funds then you are particularly talking some middleman or escrow with those funds been accumulated but its not an assurance that those funds would still be safe considering that escrows
could still ran off on whats been funded or accumulate on that particular sale.

Its actually depending on developers or teams mind because majority of projects do make out their sale and they are the ones who would hold up those funds on their own wallet addresses.

You cant determine earlier if those people would end up on running away with those money or not and this is why in depth research is a must.

You need to analyze the identity of each team member on the project, especially the core team members. Also, you need to ensure the legality of the project itself. If there is something suspicious with these, you are better to consider not investing in the project. Make sure you only choose a project with trusted team members and they want to be active to tell the community about the project progress. And they want to convince the community about where the project is located exactly.

However, most crowdsourcing project don't have escrow of the money they collected.
You are just trusting that the team will do their job so your investments will not be put to waste.
So if you are buying certain coins or tokens with your hard-earned money, better do your own due diligence.
Because no one can help you recover your funds, once the team decided to abandon the project. And that's the sad reality.
Look for actual developments if they are indeed fulfilling their timeline. If they are only talks no tangible results, doubt their capability of making things happen.

maybe multisignature wallet could be the solution for  us. some people will ask to sign transaction , if we they look it as malicious transaction if could prevent it. Project fund truely about trust , only trusted human can safe their investors money and use it for operational cost running project. many fake dev team prefer running and bring investors money , by this accident we must analize the team background before decided to invest our money.

All the projects?
Thing is there is not much indicator to it actually. That is why people still encounter these random projects doing their exit scams after the either ICO, IEO or whatever coin offering you can think of finished their stuffs.
It is just mostly lies on how much you really done your background check on the devs behind the project. Might seem generic to say, but all there is to it.

That's not even a guaranty they can still run away with your money and left the project undeveloped, if you want to be sure that you are investing in the right project, then wait for the project to get in the market, you may not be an early bird of the project but at least you can be sure that the project is on the market, don't worry there's a dump when it hit the market for the first time, so you can buy from there.

Usually I will first look at the background of the team and their social media, if there is anything suspicious I will not want to invest in the project. As for verifying that funds will be safe it may be a good idea to invest in an IDO, IEO or IFO held on a platform that already has trust in the crypto community, although there is no guarantee that the investment will always be profitable.

having a certified and trustworthy team behind of the projects can assure you that they will not run after all.  So i suggest if your buying a coin and making investment make sure to make research first and seek for specific information, because that's the most important to determine the project if it has genuine team behind or not, wherein don't just fell on what others saying, make you own way to figure it out because no one will do that for you just to avoid scam and etc

this is something that is completely beyond our control...

investor funds that go into the developer's wallet of course are already in their hands, it's similar to you sending your token to someone else's wallet of course it's completely under that person's control. This is why it is highly recommended that you invest in crypto with money that you don't really need, because the possibility of being deceived by the new project is very high.

First i would check the whitepaper and look for the part with the token allocation and token vesting schedule. In the majority of cases the team of the projects allocates around 10-20% for themself, if they are keeping more tokens for themself than i would be cautious already, also look out for allocations like "reserve" or stuff like that because that can basically just be another word for "team tokens". If they have a token allocation like "reserve" make sure that it is clearly mentioned how the funds of those allocation are spent and when they are unlocked. Regarding unlock of tokens: make sure that the tokem of the team members are fully locked for at least 6 months (most projects have 1 year full lock). After that a certain percentage gets unlocked every months or every quarter. That way you can at least be sure that the team will not dump their token on day 1.

Legit developers, the trusted team behind it, and the active community are my basis to know if my funds are safe for an ICO project. I also prefer a project with a concrete plan so I wouldn't have regrets in the future. I always check their legitimacy because it's too important that we'll be skeptical in releasing funds especially now that scammers are everywhere.

from their smart contract address, usually the developer keeps the funds from the token sale there. although not for a long time, but we can see how much money they actually raise. and how do we see whether the funds are used for development or not, that's easy. we only need to look at the progress, if the development progress is good then the funds are used according to what was planned.

All forms can be checked and detected in time except for the changed smart contract.  The rug pugglet examples on polygon make everyone shudder.  Not everyone has the knowledge to know that.  It's too difficult for me because my profession is different. Most of the time I check projects intuitively and keep a close eye on their moves!

there is no guarantee that it is safe to invest in crypto, but there is an early stage that I often see in auditing a project
1. I visited wen and looked for the community from tele to we chat maybe because with these 2 it can be seen the seriousness of the dev in making the project
2. see what their wallet is and how many hoders of their tokens are there
3. looking for CEO and team background,
4. rodamap 

Well, knowing what the future holds can be really difficult. But I think the important thing to do is verify that the team behind the project are who they are claiming to be. It will be easier for a team to pull off a scam if they are not using their true identity, because when they take off, there will be no way to find them. But, if the team are really who they claim to be, and you have checked their social profiles and confirmed that they are really who they are claiming to be, then it will be hard for them to do such a thing, because they now know that people knows who they are and they will be easily found if they should commit such act.

As long as the team didn’t own much supply of the token, I’m confident that the funds are safe beside the money you invested from them will be used for them to grow more. There’s no assurance but if you’re into a good project, then it’s worth the risk for sure.

Have some standard list every time you invest.
1. Look for the team, their history and background.
2. Know their plan and future developments, roadmap is very helpful.
3. Know the product they are offering in the market before you invest.
4. Accept the risk, and don’t expect too much.

I must admit that it's not easy to make sure about a project that it isn't scam. Before giving a project a chance, I always do a good and detailed research about it. It's really important for me to make a clear decision. Then, I do what I want to do if I start trusting it. As there are many scam projects in the market, it's not easy to give credit to a project easily.

To verify a certain project you need to learn about the project as a whole.
You should first learn about the development team, if they are professional and reputable then you should learn about their products, media sites, etc.
This can help you reduce the risk when investing in a certain project.

funding project doesn't guarantee that is safe to invest in crypto it needs alot of research starting from bounty manager that manage the project. The website of project and the people behind are true to its details roadmap and the numbers of holders of those project that can track to their wallet. The numbers of the community by the social media like telegram, twitter, facebook that tells the movement and progress of the project are all good sign of good project.

Interesting.

So to summarize the major points, what investors like to see are:

*Roadmap and roadmap completion
*Wallet addresses
*Information on team members and activity on social media

Minor points are:

*Team competency
*Verification by bounty managers or certification services

What I find interesting is that almost no one mentions any sort of governmental or institutional regulation.

How I am sure?
Honestly, I will be sure enough of a new project if:
- It has been listed on a middle-top exchange and has good volume and also a market cap.
- There is a certain and significant project development and progress by the team, real-time with professional and also reachable plans.

But, if the project still doesn't list in any exchanges, it means that it is still 50:50

There is always risk in the cryptocurrency market, but if you are knowledgeable and carefully investigate the market you can keep the risk to a minimum.
Investigate the development team, their products, the team's media and telegram sites.
Don't believe anyone's promises of profits, make your own judgement.

If you check there websites, they have address.
Picture And The Names of developers. And a lot of info that you could verify.
However, the thing is even its legit 100%.
Sometimes you cant say, if the developers just decided to quit.
You cant stop them from doing that though.

Now I don't invest in any ICO, but if I have to, I will start a big partnership. I don't believe any ICO without partnership, strong team or good exchange IEO. Just think about the devs when you are good at hoarding. Top exchange listed coins are safe even though I can remember the name of INS token. These altcoins were delisted from the Binance exchange and then Kucoin. Sometimes top exchange listed altcoins aren't safe without a good team.

Except the big and well-known cryptocurrencies in the market, actually I can't be 100% sure about a project. I do everything I need to do to know better about that project before even thinking about investing into it. But still, I rarely invest into that kind of projects.

The funds must be held through escrow or a third party that will be taking in-charge of the distribution. But if not, you can't assure that you will receive your rewards after the ICO has done unless if the devs are true with their promises. We can check also their wallet address but that also if they will present their holding wallet.
However, even though we can find out that the fund is intact, we can't assure that devs will scam us. As long as the money is still in their control, they can withdraw it anytime.

Actually, it is very important to do research before investing in any projects. Personally I  investigate the idea and docs, then I overview the team members and I also check if any “whales” are going to invest in it. One more important thing is definitely a marketing campaign and social media. You necessarily should investigate if there is a big community and there are many people who trust it and want to invest.

Definitely your topic is about new altcoins, new altcoins are tough to choose from all the scam projects. I believe in only partnership from history and other advice. New projects are building partnerships to bring trust where old projects don't want to lose their reputation. New projects can't launch their projects with a big partnership, that is also my point.

Investing is about understanding risk in terms of looking for profit, so obviously it really needs careful and strong consideration for this, because now there are so many new projects that are sometimes not worth investing in.

there are various ways to do this. check the smart contract. check whether the team really exist. also check the community behind the project to verify if they are in for a hype. check the partnership. WITH These, you can also check the team the audited the platform and their report. this is the most important on the project. the report from the team that audited the project.

It's hard to see new projects will be successful in the future or the developers are committing fraud, but we can see some important partners or teams that are in each project, for example the smartcontrack audit conducted by Certik and several exchange partners as in the list of 10 cmc rankings, that will make investors comfortable because the project looks convincing, but still nothing guarantees the project can be successful because every time new projects come up with new ideas that are better than the previous one.

Easy, you invest in mineable projects like 0xMR and RVN that have no dev wallet, no IDO, and no pre-mine. That way the devs can't dump on you or exit scam.

It is not really that odd after all this market is composed still by people that see what the governments are doing with the economy and do not trust that governments are going to do a good job, and even if we wanted them to intervene I do not think they really want to make this market safer as this plays against them.

I still think that the best solution are the ones that the community can provide by itself and an independent escrow that has a good reputation will be the best option, but most developers do not want to give up control of those funds and as such this is not very common.

I suppose it was only for DeFi or any Launchpad that held on some dApps like BakerySwap, DXSale, Unicrypt where it will be locked and the liquidity too but it can't apply to some ICO that running an mainstream sale, It's really hard to consider which one will not becoming exit scam. The only ways too do just make sure invest on asset that you can afford to lose and always do research before investing.

I dont really know, but many new projects claim that they are safe because already lock liquidity and doxxed by any trusted third party.
Its a good thing maybe, but for indicator i usually see how professional the team took care of its community and follow the roadmap.

Choose projects that sell their tokens through the site https://coinlist.co
There, project creators undergo a full security check and verification.
Choose those projects in which I invest large cryptocurrency investment funds.
Check out the projects at https://ventures.coinbase.com/
which can be added to the coinbase exchange

Doxxed is a new mechanism to kyc-ing the team, i think its really reduce the risk of scam because the identity of the team are revealed to the third party.

So unless you're able to understand programming to be able to go through the smart contract you can check for many things to see if investing in a project is going to pain you later or not.

Some of these is to check who their funders and partners are, how much they raised, the team behind it like do they have any experience, do they have a in house developer etc. On the media side you can check for their social channels and looks at their community growth and engagement. Tokenomics, checking for vesting schedules and team allocation is also crucial.

All of these little pieces will hopefully help you determine what type of project you're about to include/exclude from your investment portfolio, a decision based on facts rather than feelings.

You can join their official social media group, inside that group you will get a lot of important information from fellow members about the progress and development of the project.
Don't forget to also read the whitepaper and research who's joining the team to make sure you invest and anticipate bad things in the future.

This is nowhere near enough to verify that your funds are safe when you invest in a project, after all there are thousands of projects that have been left without being finished and any scammer can grab that code and claim that they have been working on an independent project for a very long time and show the code as evidence of their work.

But then you find out that this was nothing more but a ruse to deceive investors but by the time that you do it it is simply too late and it is impossible for you to recover your money, so you need to be very careful as scammers are incredibly ingenious when it comes to try to deceive people in order to get their money.

even after doing all that we can still get caught in a scam project. There are many fraud scenarios that fraudsters can commit. that is why when investing we must be really prepared to lose, and only use free funds, only invest what you can afford to lose.
I remembered Merlin. one of the projects that was quite successful in the BSC network, its farming and staking offered huge profits, even it was audited by certik, but the ending was painful because the dev team argued that they were under attack so liquidity was destroyed and prices actually fell. many argued that it was a sinister scenario and the dev team ran away.
That being said, there are a lot of surprises in this ecosystem, so really think about the risks and don't just rely on luck.

The devs themselves need to be transparent and have constant updates to their followers and investors about the development and the progress of the project. Many people don't review the team before they put their money in which is the riskiest thing you could do when you invest. knowing the team behind the project is crucial and also makes your heart feel at ease when they also publish about their partnership which you can also search if it's true or not. if they have those traits then consider your funds are safe and have some low chance to be stolen.

Not all projects are like 0xMR and RVN. Most projects have dev wallets because there is a token allocation for developers. It will be difficult to join only on the project with the criteria you said before. The reasonable solution is below:
1. Know the team members of the projects in detail
2. Make sure the projects have trusted partnerships
3. Take a look at their community
4. Have convincing whitepaper, including a clear roadmap
5. No bad issues related to the team members or the project itself

The first thing I see of a project is the team that handles it. Here there is a team that is already known to be good and reliable. In addition, I also saw the prospects of the project, if the goals and objectives are good then it will also affect the results. It is indeed difficult to choose a good project because at this time a lot of new projects have sprung up with their respective advantages. Personally I'm also still learning to choose a good project by learning from my own previous experience. Choosing a project should not be arbitrary as long as, we have to really observe and analyze the project properly, the example of the team, the goals of the project and also the progress of the project whether it is good or not. Make sure everything is good so we can get good projects too.

Be careful to analyze it, it is probably well written on the whitepaper but cannot be applied in fact. There are many projects having great goals on their whitepaper but it doesn't reflect what they did. Check what progress they have reached and the possibility to continue it in the future. If you think it is only applicable in the beginning, while hard to reach the final goal, you are better to not join it. They just try to attract people to invest their funds on thei initial sales.

Having a great white paper does not mean that they will be successful and if you look in the past there were projects that looked genuine but they were not able to deliver what they set out even after collecting millions and the investors are the losers while the developers run away with the collected money even though they did not do anything and that is the risk you need to understand when you are investing in any project.

project team Check the project developers and people related to the project, whether there are legitimate developers and a trustworthy team behind them.
Community building and management A truly safe and reliable project team will have managers in the community to deal with some problems at any time, and to promote and maintain their own projects.
Before investing in a project, understand and study the project itself, study its roadmap, and reduce investment risk losses as much as possible.

This is the risk that we have to take all investments have no guaranteed return even a well establish company or Cryptocurrencies suffered losses or go bankrupt, you can lessen or minimize your potential losses by not investing in ICO because they are unregulated and doing research on the people behind the project, and following if they are making progress on their roadmap.

It is true that nobody can guarantee that your funds are safe but if the team is Professional and  has good historical record of launching successful projects, the project is backed by strong community and in case of DEFI it should have Audit certificate as well as backed by well known insurance company  then to some extent you should not much worry about security of funds but still no guarantee.

I've been exit scammed and rug-pulled by devs several times so now so I only invest in mineable projects with no dev wallet, like Raven and 0xMonero. Those are the safest options.

There is always no guarantee for the safety of our funds since we analyze them visually only. I mean we can't check the company office or see the team member directly. The description of the team members from a crypto project can be manipulated, which means it is written with fake information. So, there is still a chance of losing our money here. However, with all those analyses, we have done our best to avoid scammers. Those ways truly minimize the possibility of scammers deceiving us.

There is no way to verify that your funds are safe if they are in someone else's custody. The safest investment is minable cryptos like 0xMR and Raven where there is no team wallet to exit scam or rug-pull with.

I always do careful research and here it is what I am focused on. First of all I investigate the idea of the project and its docs, then I overview the team members (their portfolio)  and I also check if any “whales” are going to invest in it. Secondly, I find out about marketing campaigns and social media. Also I get know if there is a big community and there are many people who trust it and want to invest.

It is true that the main task for projects is to build a strong community and make as many people aware of your project as possible. To have such a loyal community, devs should always show their work and achievements, give bonuses for community members, offer different competitions to advertise your product and encourage people.

For me my reference was go to there Website and try to search their groups if they are truly Exist. And make sure that they started already their projects and if they really legit.

The team is the main key to find out if the project is legit or scam, if the team is clear then next you have to find out the background of the team, experience is the key to project success.
Next is the progress made, whether the project follows the roadmap or not, if everything goes according to plan, most likely the project is legit, then you just need to monitor what the team is doing, if there are suspicious signs you can get out faster. I've done this method many times and the results are very good.

It may be difficult to secure funds in the custody of project team members as most of the times, they are anonymous.   The solution to secure project funds is for the community of such project must hold project team members accountable for all their actions and sanction should be melted out where and when there is default!  Another solution may be multi sign access to fund by team members and community and trusted escrow as well!

Actually it is not easy to choose a good project, but I will look at the smart contract and whether TVL will be locked for a long time and other thing is SAFU, some investors in the BSC network use this system to increase new investor confidence but there is no guarantee of profit in investing because we do not know what the developers will do in the future and stay DYOR mate  ;)

that's what happens a lot in the case of new projects like that. We are like returning to 2018 which will see many successful projects in sales but running away from the community and investors.
we have seen many such cases in the past. and I think it will continue to repeat itself in the future.

Yes and some just disappear without notice. There are also teams who hire some PhD, call that person a team member, and when the fundraising is over you out of a sudden see the person disappear from the TG channel. A few weeks afterwards the core team announces that after some trouble the PhD had to leave the team for a better future of the whole project. Of course... They just pay those guys to lend them their academic title and then say goodbye.

the first is the contract address, it must be thoroughly examined, the next is to make sure to choose an ico that already has an exchange so that it can really be trusted. because we can sell on the exchange.
that's a simple tip from me good luck

No one can be sure the project funds will be safe, a lot of them scam by selling all their coins make softrug when the price starts to rise. But we can trust projects that have passed the audit obtained from reputable auditors such as certix. the possibility that a project will be scam after being audited by certix will be small.

It all depends on what kind of project it is, I am not going to keep my money on exchanges and similar platforms and I have never kept it.

If I buy some coins, then after the purchase I immediately transfer them to my secure hardware wallets, no matter what kind of project would be reliable - I can't trust my money to him!

If we are talking about some profitable stacking, then I study the project for a few days, look at its dynamics and communicate on social networks about the project, what people think about it.

But I also don't invest a lot of money in staking.

That's right after an audit of the platform it will be less likely to scam.
but the risk to our funds is still there. because when the token is traded the price can fall immediately. not a scammer, but this is related to the market capacity of the new project which is not very strong.

Read whitepaper or litepaper and follow there promise and token features after that check token contact And match the features of the contract address with the words of the cables. If all goes well then follow their developments regularly. If you find a development match with their promise, you can decide to invest there

No one can say for sure that the funds of any project are safe the number of scammers in the market has increased a lot and they are hacking everything by fraud therefore, in order to secure your funds for any project you need to check the sites thoroughly. Your personal information cannot be shared with any other site this will reduce the risk.

i think before you invest any project,you shound search for this team,If you don't find any information about this team,I think 99% scam.If you find some information about this team,you should check how many project they done,and this project is die or devepoping, beacause I see there are many team do more and more project and when they done,they abadon and do another project to collect money from everone.With me,one good project to investing: the good team,there are some people join some success project and now this project are devepoping,you can check them on twitter,facbook or linked,check clear ìnormation before investing,the most importance is team,good team with good person is good project

It is very difficult to ensure that the money we invest in an ico will be safe and used fully for the benefit of project development, but to reduce risk there may be a few things to consider:
1. Team members have active real social media.
2. Contract addresses are audited by a third party such as Certik.
3. Have real cooperation with well-known companies.
4. In the implementation of the ICO, the funds collected are held by a trusted third party.

It will continue and we have to work more in  securing our investments, scammers are just checking

those investors who are not aware of this process, or some lazy traders who are not doing research

and just quickly invest their money to those assets.

Contract address they say, but I'm really not sure what to look at the contract address. I'm an investor of ICO before but before that what I try to do is just follow my instinct, check the roadmap and whitepaper other than that just trusting the the project however I've been scammed multiple times and I don't think that method is right or probably not enough. I'm curious too how to check if the funds are safe, thorough looking at the contract.

All projects after the public sale program have been developed very well according to the roadmap but cannot be used as a basis for trusting the project completely because some suspicions were found after the development of the next roadmap stage, my suggestion is to bookmark the contract related addresses and usually there are parties who activate token notifications on the telegram bot.

Join projects from reliable fundraising platforms, l recommend looking into polkastarter for example they have strict rules and there is no room for projects escaping with investors money for years to come, do some research on that

But does that really solve the problems? When you sell coins that are worthless and part of a scam project into the hands of someone else who knows less than you? You might be better off, but from the community perspective it is still a victim that now holds a bag of scam coins and lost money. Selling a scam project to another person and exploiting that person's lack of knowledge isn't that much better than the scam itself.

The major many investors did back during the last bill run was that, they all think since project easily get listed on Uniswap and other decentralized exchanges give them this immunity over fraud but it turn out that it was even a stepping stone for developers to steal from investors.
Again, how most of them fell into this trap was because they were all greedy, most of top altcoins were ready pump and since they already miss out, they sort out for alternative new projects to 2x,3x and 10x. While some turn out well and some ended in tears.

I will not go to ICO. I will prefer to follow the IEO of a project in the middle-top exchanges. Or I will alternatively go to Launchpad in middle-top exchanges. Moreover Binance.
If ICO, I will not risk my funds again there.

How they sell the tokens, their team, roadmap, and also the detail of every proof of the projects. Of course, fundamentals are a good reason too to take the project. but not for ICO.

some  developers have bad character , and they just take our money and then leave the project till its die. we've been see it many time , CEO or another team run with investors money. To overcome this problem we have to always care about dev team background, is it trusted person to manager our money building project or no.

I think this topic is very interesting and needs further discussion, this is a very good question in my opinion. before investing in a project as you mean, you should first pay attention to the community of those who want to develop a project. the rest you can also check some of their websites are they real or fake websites they attached. you can also see the updates they are doing, if they are serious in developing then there will certainly be updates every time. build communication among investors that is more important to do.