Bitcoin Forum

So what's the consensus on this? I have my own opinion but want to hear your guys opinion on it. As far as theymos is concerned he doesn't care about scam/Shady ICOs so what do you default trust members think about people who offer services to these ICOs knowing they are shady or not doing their research before working with them. Especially people who offer community management/social media management and even to some extent designing services to these ICOs?

In the past, people have gotten bad ratings for promoting projects that knowingly used lies for their promotion.

My personal opinion is that managers should do some initial checking to see if the project they're taking in make any outrageous or fake claims: f.e.: A new ICO claiming to have raised 10m USD while on pre-ico or fake team members/partnerships. But anything beyond that isn't the manager's responsibility.

For example: If the project goes on to scam after the manager takes it in, this was beyond the manager's control, so in my opinion the manager shouldn't take the blame unless there's good indication that he knew from before.

Hmm, So what about the useless ICOs who are destined to fail?

IMO, I guess managers ignore those necessary decisions with regards in accepting the ICO projects for the sake of getting paid. On the contrary, I know some reputed managers that really do prior research about ICO that wants their service because they want to keep the good image they built along the years. There are only a few left of them now. So as bounty hunters we should do our part and now always rely on bounty managers.

If someone knowingly works with such an ICO they should be held responsible. The trouble is - it's almost impossible to determine the real intent if the person simply says "I didn't know".

Perhaps the managers should be paid in those worthless ICO tokens to be held in escrow for at least 3 years. Not going to happen though.

So the gist of all this is that getting paid is above everything else.

If there is any feeling the ICO is being shady/deceitful, it would be in one's best interest to not work with them. Not only for that persons reputation on this forum, but also, there is no guarantee that these ICO creators or "teams" would not be held accountable for their actions IRL (assuming they piss of the wrong people or cause enough damage)... and the person helping them could get dragged into it all as a "team member".

From a DT perspective, I would have to take it on a case-by-case basis and would need to be confident enough that the person involved knew the ICO was shady and willingly helped perpetrate a scam, in which case, they are not trustworthy IMO.

Although it seems like DT members have varying levels of what they would need to satisfy being "confident enough" that someone was willingly helping a scam ICO. As suchmoon said, it's almost impossible to determine without a doubt the real intent of the person, but people have left trust based on their personal belief, without 100% conclusive proof of intent, and have had little if anything happen to them, so whether it's 100% determined you were willingly helping or not, any DT member could argue how shady a scam ICO appears/appeared and that they don't believe you didn't know it was a scam.

... then you'd have to start opening thread after thread screaming "trust abuse" only to realize it may be too grey of an area for anyone else to defend you on.

That being said, I don't typically look at ICOs until they are pointed out to me, not that I don't want to browse through and research, but unfortunately scammers have way more time and resources than I and it's tough to keep up with.

My advice for those that choose to engage with these ICOs is to vet and research the ICO, group, team members, etc., keep track of your research, and be ready to defend your decision with the research and vetting you did. I still feel like you would be accepting a risk though.

This list theymos posted is a good reference to use when vetting, although it would be tough to expect everyone to go through *all* of this, as this list was meant for an ICO certification service, but I believe the general ideas are there of what to look for.

'Destined to fail' isn't something verifiable.

There are verifiable metrics that would make out a clear cut case of a scam. F.e.:
Stolen team portraits
plagiarized whitepaper
stolen assets for web-design
lack of attributions & licenses in open source code use
and most importantly fake claims for funds raised.

But other than that, the "uselessness" of an ICO is something subjective.

Look at pretty much any ICO that went past the TGE and you'll see that the what's put in practice deviates greatly from the vision most of the time, even most big ICOs have yet to prove themselves in being 'useful'. And still the initial investors believed in their usefulness and had the opportunity to profit greatly. The most successful projects in terms of total fund-raising are arguably performing terribly in delivering any promises in practice (namely and not limited to IOTA, EOS, NEO, VEN). Should people that marketed those be held liable just because there (yet) isn't any real use for those tokens? I think not.
Probably no investor would try to hold an ICO team liable for over-promising while tokens trade above ICO price. So utility in crypto is entirely subjective.