The whitepaper is often regarded as the face of the project. That’s where you, at least theoretically, find out what the project is all about, what they want to do, how they want to do it, and, most importantly, when. A decent whitepaper takes serious effort: thorough market research, design work, calculations, conceptual development, and lots of other things are integral parts of a good paper. As a result, writing a good whitepaper usually requires a lot of time (and sometimes money), which scammers cannot afford.
but you need to remember,Good projects are quite thorough about their whitepapers in a good way. If you have too many questions after reading a whitepaper, it definitely means that it was a bad one, and the project did not make an effort to be clear enough. It doesn’t matter if it was intentional or just a result of little attention paid to making the whitepaper, it’s still a bad sign.
the point is this, if you see that a project’s whitepaper is sloppy, too generalized, or lacks any realistic roadmap, that should make you cautious. At very best, the project might not be a scam but they’re still not taking their work seriously enough. Nevertheless, usually, scammers either hire foreign students who don’t speak good enough English to write their whitepapers, which results in a cornucopia of hilariously silly errors or they just plagiarize someone else’s work, which is even cheaper (but certainly more obvious).
correction if I'm wrong
That's exactly it! I've translated my share of whitepapers and there are huge differences in content, organization, language, errors, etc... in that point of view it is not hard to spot a scam paper... nevertheless the scammers can crop parts of other good whitepapers and make a quick adaptation... that is not so easy to spot unless you have been reading a lot of them...
These topics are good to educate and fight scams
