Dear community,
dear like-minded fellows,

As I am a big proponent of social justice and transparency, and I would like to have your advise on this.

I am planning to assess several ICOs. My specific questions is about pre-sales. I understand they bear a higher risk as initial investment as the outcome of a "successful" ICO is not given.

- To what degree it is more dangerous to fall into the hand of scammers? Is there any way I can mitigate risk by already utilising a smart contract that refunds the investment in case of failure to reach soft cap? Or is the regular process most of the time without smart contract and purely based on the distribution afterwards? Is it common to use escrow for pre-sales in a sense?

- A projects claims they have already raised a given funding in pre-sales and thus announcing that the underlying project passed the soft cap threshold, hence the project will be deployed independent from official ICO result. Is there any way I can verify these statements? As for me this claims just sound like good teasers to attract further investment. What is the usual process to verify pre-sales results? When I asked for proof, people responded, providing proof is difficult as investors chipped in BTC, ETH and FIAT. However, is it legitimate to ask for wallets in order to scan and see the transactions? It seems for me most investors don't do their due diligence on this statements.

Many thanks.

Best,
aVanos