ICO Scam Question

[bongiu]

You can use your common sense for starters. Read the whitepaper, check out the team, look at their LinkedIn profiles (if they have 'em). That way you will know what kind of people they are and if they're just there to earn some quick bucks

[Hafik]

ICO Scam, sometimes things like that that make Investor and Bounty Hunter so confused. finally they must be good at choosing a good ICO for the future.

[rjbtc2017]

Is there a way that we can determine on how to know if an ICO offer is a scam or not?

Honestly, I don't think there is a way to know or to determine if there is an ICO that is considered as a scam or not. Actually, even if you can do a lot of research if the ICO is planned to scam investors then it will happen, even if the ICO has a credible team ( which we don't know if they just get the photo in the internet and use it here on the forum ( which already happened )) I cannot be so sure if that ICO is really scam or not.

[BRNSTYLE]

In my humble opinion to improve your chances to not being scammed you should make your own small research before investing: search info about devs, consultants et. al, get familiar with business plan and its adequacy in general.   
If ICO foundation or its team members have something in common with Russia you could also make an inquiry here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2210684.0, we’ll definitely help you to understand projects’ credibility much better.     

[gabmen]

Well it's about doing proper research and making use of the all the avilable resources to get as mucg information on an ico. You'll see if its a good project so look behind the ico itself, the team behind it, it's support, how will people accept it

[ico_reviews]

There are some ICOs that are legit and offer a solution to a real problem, while presenting paths to said solution. Some are plain scams.
We, as part of the investing community, set up to review ICOs objectively and thoroughly. Give us a read, it's free, and you might find our research on these companies useful.

https://cryptorated.com

[just_Alice]

Is there a way that we can determine on how to know if an ICO offer is a scam or not?

No, ICO, by analogy with typical crowdfunding can only be based on trust. At the outside you can try to predict the probability of project's success, but even if it's successful it doesn't mean that founders aren't scammers. As for me, ICO seems like a scam, they attracted way too much money in a short period of time, at the same time for some really cool and promising projects, which have more evidences it isn't always that easy to find investors.

[ahmedjamal1998]

Well we all wish if there was an actual legit way to find out if this new ICO is a scam or not.
But the sad truth is NO. But you can still do your part of researching enough about that project and just decide if it's worth your investment.

And mainly if something is too good to be true, it's a lie. The problem is the only time you find it it's a scam is when the devs decide to leave and run away with all your money. You won't realize anything before that.

Actually I've seen a lot of scam ICOs around since I came here back in 2015 and they mainly play and succeed with newcomers who are too eager to earn a lot of money easily and end up losing their investments.

[krypt0n1]

You won't know for sure but you can make an educated guess based off a little digging into the team (look at the teams backgrounds), seeing if what they propose is reasonable, seeing if the amount they are raising justifies the project....actually those aren't even necessarily correlated. There's been some solid projects that ask for ridiculous amounts of money, so could be considered scams...even though they plan on delivering or actually deliver a product. Anyway, best you can do is research the team/product heavily and have some faith. Any of these new projects could topple.

[NoiseBoy]

Do a lot of research.

There are ICO review sites out there.

Plus doing your own basic review isn't too hard. Check the LinkedIn profiles of team members and see if they look legit. Look for professionalism throughout their website, announcement, and other media. Most valuable of all, try to only get involved with ICOs that already have a minimum viable product. If there's a beta you can test yourself, at least you know you're not dealing with complete vaporware.

[anasso]

if you see buzz words like "first ever", "fastest", "most secure", the most of cases it's a SCAM!

if it's a sofisticated scam, it's too late when the scam is uncover!!!

[DanWagner]

No i don't think you can . Not every ico is a scam but everybody can run away with your money if they want.
Some people take the risk and make a lot of money , but a lot of people lose to.

[jlp]

The easiest way to reduce your risk of scams is to use 2 simple filters:

1)  HAS THE PROJECT BUILT ANYTHING THAT YOU CAN USE TODAY? If no, move on. EVERYTHING ELSE IS USELESS:  Team, fancy (pretentious) titles, references, roadmap, video, fancy animations, escrow, blogs, Slack, Telegram, Twitter, Facebook and white paper.

Many projects have these and they cannot prove that they can build anything. Writing software needs much more skill, work and time than anything else in their project. Several projects had great profiles, raised multiple millions and still haven't delivered any software.

EOS raised $230 million and said that they were going to release something by end of summer.  Nothing yet. With $230 million, EOS should have solved world hunger by now.

Gnosis raised $12.5 million and their website says that they are releasing their game by first half of 2017. Nothing yet.

Qtum raised $15.6 million. I don't see anything produced on Qtum's website.

After raising $50 million, Cosmos's website is still pitching its white paper. Come on. What have they produced with that $50 million?

MobileGo raised $53 million. Here's the roadmap from their white paper:

May - June: Gamecredits Mobile Store Public Launch
May - June: Gamecredits accepted for mobile store games and in- game content purchases
July - August: first centralized tournaments on platform

However, I don't see any of that on their website. They're mainly bragging about how their token is on exchanges. What are they doing? Day-trading their own token?

2)  IS THE TEAM FROM A CORRUPT COUNTRY? If yes, move on. In corrupt countries, ethics and honesty are more lax, which means that they will have a higher tendency to exaggerate or lie.

https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_perceptions_index_2016

There are ICOs coming from countries that sent out thousands of phishing scams in past years.  Why would you take the risk of investing in ICOs from those countries?

Also, avoid any ICO endorsed by Paris Hilton or Floyd Mayweather...unless they can explain what Raiden, Lightning Network, POW/POS/POI and Segwit are.

[SiiGLe]

Yes you can if you are smart enough. Chect he project deeply. If they are saying like you will make lots of money without saying much about details of their project you should definetly stay away from them. Just be extra cautious and you will be fine.

[ndyarisya]

You can see from the team, the product theme sponsor,
But as good as it does not need investment, because many investors are losers because the tokens that they buy when out in the market dropped