Some altcoins can still pass KYC, have a licence, pass some audit verification, and still be scammed. It's very easy, and it's common during this period to acquire information that could be used to pass such verification. Such verification is common online, and that's why the dark web has been declared a bad place because they sell things like that.
We should always do our own research and see how serious those who are offering some tokens to us are and if what they say they are creating is being created and developed as they say they are developing, because most of them are just making fake promises and using that means to raise funds from investors, but at the end they end up using up the money for their own selfish interests.
Exactly, scammers can do everything possible to scam people, they do all that to make people to believe that everything is okay with the project and they can even work or be active for some years to do business with customers with a legal and legit ways but when they have accumulated enough amount which have been looking for them they would start the maintenance of the site and from the maintenance of the site everything would went off and your funds would get lost. We should always do our own research and see how serious those who are offering some tokens to us are and if what they say they are creating is being created and developed as they say they are developing, because most of them are just making fake promises and using that means to raise funds from investors, but at the end they end up using up the money for their own selfish interests.
And really this guys have different strategies to scam people though what the op said is good but whenever investing in altcoins make a good research about the project before investing.
This is very sad because developers who have the intention to scam investors can have a long term plan to gain trust and when they've reached their expected target they'll just crash everything, while their investors will bear the lose. So it's true that scammers can also follow the due process like genuine developers and fulfill all the KYC protocols, in the end their true intentions will still manifest.
This is by no means underscoring the OP well articulated warning signs that we should look out for when checking if an altcoin is a scam, they greatly help to reduce the chances of involving our hard earned money in scam projects. He has provided us with enough guidelines to carry out research on new projects, so it's left for everybody to decide whether to apply them or use other methods to carry out their research.
