Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin expert: All ICOs are scams
App coins and Initial Coin Offerings have become a rising trend in the cryptocurrency market. However, Counterparty Foundation’s Community Director Chris DeRose equals them to Ponzi schemes.
http://www.coinfox.info/news/6462-bitcoin-expert-all-icos-are-scams

Good read, and mostly correct.  There was a lot of hyped projects this year that went nowhere with questionable tactics by the devs. Hopefully 2017 will be free of ICO ripoffs.

This trend is not rising. It exists since years. You don't have to be an expert to know that. The vast majority of altcoins have been created as quick pump-and-dump schemes, often with direct or indirect premine. The same hold true for almost all Bitcoin-related assets that trade on virtual exchanges. Those that are not an outright scam are managed by entirely incompetent people. The advent of 2nd-layer systems such as counterparty has only led to an increase in such kind of offerings, because the setup of schemes becomes easier, so even the least talented scammers can try their luck.

Sadly there are still enough people that fall for these offerings - often out of pure greed. As long as these people are throwing money at every "investment opportunity", scams won't disappear.

ya.ya.yo!

Scams happen when people lose sight of the underlying product and blindly invest.
Unfortunately, this has been happening a lot these days.

It's greed. People have seen how Ethereum has gone up like there is no tomorrow after its public sale. People are trying and hoping to buy themselves in such a jackpot once again. That's why they just blindly put their money in certain ICO's without actually doing research. These people mostly find themselves being burned as of course only a very few of the ICO's will experience some sort of success.