I want to add more and took points from your article
1. Know the team behind the coin
How to find team behind ICO? there is lot of tools we can se for image reserve. I mostly using few tools like google images and yandex images.
2. Read the whitepaper
Sometimes project has good white paper, but behind of good whitepaper they have, it from plagiarized WP. so, kindly check using plagiarism tools when you reading WP.
3. Look for unrealistic crypto claims
Correct, if someone saying if they can give 200% - 300% within a day or months of profits, it will 99.9999% ponzi or potentially scam, please wake up, no one can be rich overnight. Please, don't be fooled because you want higher profits. Even IEO will become a scam, so be careful.
4. Not being open-sourced
I don't know open source if really matter or not, because many projects open their codes for public, but sometimes I still find a project hiding their malicious program. Maybe for open source we need to check how many people join to audit. If there is any project with github account, but no one join, be careful, please scan file after download before you are installing it.
Btw, you are making good articles. keep it up
I definitely agree with above points and i would add some annotations from my point of view:
5. Look on the website projectIt could seem pointless, but many of scam coins had or have impressive homepage of websites with many animation, beautiful color etc. Human mind associates beauty with some reliable stuffs, so beautiful website = reliable project. Keep in mind that it is psychological effect.
6. Have a look how much money organizers want to collect If you spot that goal of funding is extremely huge so do you think that developers will working hard? Why they should do that? Them bank accounts are fully from bucks ICO or IEO and implementation of roadmap is so hard.
7. Campaign marketingThis point is partially compatible with point 5. During ICO many scam projects have perfect marketing. I mean twitters per hour, post on facebook fanpage 20 per day, professional session and presentation video on the youtube. Be aware that projects during ICO are totally unrealistic. It are only ideas not real products.
By the way article is good and i have to commend of the author for hard working. Keep going!