This post:
If you meet a stranger on the street and he asks you for 100$ and tells you he will give you 200$ back tomorrow, will you blindly give him the 100$ ? It's the same thing here, and just because it's a crypto-thing doesn't mean you have to give your money away without doing a few basic verifications.
If you send out money to some unknown place on the internet and get ripped off, that's on you. Not the trust system.
Some projects were looking very much legit and could easily mislead even some educated crypto investors. Fo example monetha.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/ann-ico-monetha-decentralised-reputation-with-built-in-payments-1978067 - Thread is closed to avoid uncomfortable questions.
Lithuanian scam organized by a stripper Justas Pikelis who was posing as a crypto ertenpenior but later was exposed by forum members. That guy was a night bar stripper. He and his partners found a former paypal executive manager Eric Duprat via linkedin and offered him to participate in a new crypto project. At that time Duprat was unemployed and struggling financially. So he said yes. After he appeared in the team in 2017 during ICO boom that project received 38 million dollars in the first opening day of ICO. Tokens were sold for 0.4 USD but after the listing the price decreased only and now the price is $0.02079 and 24h volume is $900. And a few basic verifications like you said did not help at all. There was no white paper and nothing was delivered at the end of the project. (Just some shitty app made by a student for $500) It was all Eric Duprat who had no idea what was going on and who was just posing as a team member. He received his $1.5 million and was very happy. Was that a giveaway to some unknown place on the internet as another of our colleagues mentioned. I do not think so. Some scams are well organized and even a veteran forum member can fall for it. Read about BTC gold that I mentioned above.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bitcoin-gold-a-well-thought-scam-2253633
Should clear things up
