ICOs are a typical example of people spoiling a good thing through greed. When the craze started, it was hailed in the US and other western countries as the Little guys chance to get rich. It was celebrated as a way by which anybody having BTC or ETH could be a part of investing in startups. The ICOs like Tezos, Bancor broke records and raised millions of USD in BTC/ ETH.
At the chance of sounding regionalistic/ racist, I must say, this is when the netherworlds of Internet took notice. Russia, Eastern Europe, Thailand, Phillipines, India etc. all had a lot of tech savvy youngsters good at 'copying' stuff and making it look snazzy. So they copied the typical website template. Whitepaper, Crazy techno-babble about vaporware and buzzwords like decentralize, Permissionless, Blockchain, AI, Machine Learning, etc etc. The most important part was the Team and Advisors..
10 people dressed in suits to appear as the CEO, CFO types and 10 people with curly long hair and beards to appear as the crazy programmer type (Tech Lead, CTO etc etc).
Man this shit would be hilarious as hell if it hadn't made people bleed so much money. Hell, its hilarious even now because all sort of greedy idiots fell for them.
During the 2017 bull run, the clogged transactions on BTC and ETH were a result of people trying to get the earliest tokens as soon as "Pre-Sale" started. These people then simply disappeared. It was all assisted by bounties by irresponsible managers here at Bitcointalk. Fake facebook and twitter accounts with 5000 followers for highest stakes, rows upon rows of excel sheets. People putting others articles in their own name for stakes. It was crazy as hell for anyone who wanted to believe in the initial euphoria and promise. I was personally disappointed and disgusted by seeing the levels to which people would fall to scam others.
This is when the racist comments about "third-world pajeets" became the trend and frankly, I could never fault them for being that angry and disgusted. Now it looks like a bunch of those ICOs dumped their ETH and BTC onto exchanges to secure their ill-gotten gains as soon as possible.
I just hope enough people have learnt their lessons.