First of all, it should be obvious that a project is fake if it has no whitepaper. Whitepaper is definitely the most important part of a project. This will give the people the idea about the project, including the details about the coin/token.
Second, a project should have a well-designed and organized website. Although the looks and designs of a website doesn't guarantee that the project is real (especially that there are a lot of people nowadays that can do web designing easily), it is still safer to join a project with a great website as it will serve as the mirror of the project.
Another thing to look at when joining an ICO is the list of team members. Most project/ICO developers uses the word PRIVACY to hide their identity. Although this is reasonable, there are still some devs who put their team members' faces and backgrounds in their websites. These ICOs/projects are more trustworthy than those who do not show the list of team members.