In my experience, no amount of due diligence will protect you if the service does decide to exit and abscond with your funds.
Then you are not investing, you are gambling, which is completely different. If you give an ico here money, you are gambling, it is that simple, because nobody would invest in something like that. You invest in equity behind real businesses and people, you gamble in coins, icos and stuff since you own nothing but a fake token. Legally, I have never seen a white paper where one of the coins even has to pay what they agreed to because of how they are written or because they were illegal to begin with and would be thrown out in court if you tried to sue. With equity you own part of the business and if something happens you are able to take control over it, and you would not invest in something where the business backing the money had no value so there is pretty much no risk there, just a little bit of time in court to force a company takeover or receivership. This all boils back to what I said though, that people here do not invest, and we can see this because of all the claims of scams. If they actually invested there would be no way to claim this because they would have everything backed legally and there is no way someone that invests would risk being countered for something like libel because you can be sued for calling people scammers until they have been criminally convicted.
It is really hard to find real investments here because people are so easily scammed that businesses will not follow proper procedure since they know stupid people will still keep giving them money blindly. It is why I hope governments start to regulate things more. I do not care if someone stupid gets scammed but as an investor it is mostly a waste of time to try and find things here since they are almost all scams and those who are not scams still have no legal requirement to pay your portion of what they agreed to so you are just gambling in the hope that some stranger will do what they said...
We can argue semantics but I actually agree with you in the sense that every investment, after all, is a gamble. There is never a guarantee of profit - every solid, sound investment prospective in conventional finance explicitly says so in so many fine print words.
I'm not even talking about ICOs or any example you've given - the investments I've made don't involve owning anything, no tokens, no equity. Except for the work I do with start ups (which by your definition also means I'm gambling, and yes, in case you missed the point, you take gambles with start ups, since nothing is guaranteed).
By your definition, are all the people who claimed scams to the national bank of Greece, or Enron, or any other sound, protected, insured, investment tool in fact gamblers who didn't really invest? Did Greeks gamble their life savings by entrusting it to their government and hoping it would do what it promised to (guarantee their deposits)?
Like I said, as "real" as your investment can become, as solid as your due diligence can get, nothing can prevent things from folding if they do.
