Initial Coin Offering SCAMS
HOW TO AVOID?
Let's define first what is Initial Coin Offering or ICO?
ICO is an unregulated means by which funds are raised for a new cryptocurrency venture.
My idea on ICO is
CROWD FUNDING .
Now let's move on how can we avoid
ICO SCAM Crowdfunding is shaping the future of finance. No longer does investment belong to the few and no longer does launching a project mean having to go through all the required conditions of Venture Capital investment. There are now multiple platforms where users can crowdfund their dreams and projects into reality.
Observe this things to avoid it. - Unrealistic goals
- Buzzword salad
- Whitepaper
- No Code Repository
- Team
Unrealistic goals If the project does have that potential, professional developers will never make such promises. They will let you know about the potential of their project and that’s it. No serious team will ever make a price prediction about their token or claim it can fix the world.
Buzzword salad “Our decentralized blockchain-based platform will disrupt the landscape of cryptocurrency investment while building a trustless network of pseudonymous users that leverage swarm intelligence technology to provide real world financial services in a tokenized ecosystem.”
Some people may have a tendency to use buzzwords as a means to turn a boring text or announcement into something exciting. However, these will have a certain amount of information on it, even if you have to filter out some of the nonsense. Still, if a project needs to do this, then the project is likely to be as boring as watching paint dry.
Whitepaper Whitepapers usually explain how the platform works both on the high-level and specifically. This often includes charts, calculations, simulations, specifications and so forth. If your project claims that it is building some sort of decentralized service or token with new features and actually provides no explanation of how it works specifically, then just close the document and walk away.
No Code Repository This is what matters. Like someone said before “Code is law”. Even if the project announcement and whitepaper are complete trash, you can always count on Github or Sourceforge to put an end to all doubts. If the project provides no link to the code at all or if the project is nothing more than a clone with a few changed lines of code, then it’s not worth your time nor money.
Team This is very important. Who is behind the project? Is the team made up of well-known members of the cryptocurrency community? Are they known in other areas? Have they been involved in previous projects? If the answer is yes, then this may be an interesting opportunity. Just remember to check if the person is actually aware of the project as scammers may use famous names just to get people interested even though these are not part of the team.
s/www.cryptocompare.com/coins/guides/how-to-avoid-scam-icos/%3faltTemplate=WebPageAMPGuide]SOURCEI believe more in whitepaper to identify scams thiugh we all know that a good whitepaper doesn't tell for certain if an ICO is scam.
Also, sometimes, we shouldn't just warn people about scam ICOs alone, there are some legit ICOs out there that have failed due to bad plans and other criteria. People should be warned against scam ICOs as well as ICOs that are doom to fail.
Nice point helping with identify scams
I just dropped a detailed explanation on whitepaper and it's usefulness .
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/a-newbies-options-5039628