Nowadays, it is harder to trust cryptocurrency projects than ever before. A lot has happened in the past 18 months. We have seen many scams, hacks and plenty of criminal accusations against people who were involved with successful ICOs. Below is a checklist that will help you to identify scam ICOs. Now let’s have a look at the list.
A New Website With No History On Any Other Sites
This is one of those things that should give you a red light straight away. If you see an ICO project which has been created right before the pre-sale or during it, don’t even consider investing in it, most likely it’s a scam.
No Code Repository Provided For Review
This is a very important thing to look at. If you visit the ICO website, go into the “How it works” section and you won’t find any information that links to GitHub, most likely it’s a scammy project because it hasn’t been put much effort into developing the idea behind the product.
In this situation, investors should be extremely cautious about putting their money in it. It is even more lucrative for scammers to create an ICO project without a GitHub because almost no one will bother checking if all those claims are true or not and therefore there is a high chance of success.
Team Members With Fake Names And Photos
Again, if you see fake names and photos of the team members it probably means that ICO is a scam. Just like in real life, in the crypto world, people usually don’t use pseudonyms (i.e Satoshi Nakamoto) but they stick to their real identities which are available on LinkedIn or some other public platform.
Anonymous Team
If you can’t find any information on crypto news about the core team behind the project on the website – walk away immediately. It has definitely something to do with some criminal activity.
If scammers had some good intentions they would make everything transparent for everyone to see; however, this is not how they work. They want to remain anonymous while taking your money and disappearing into thin air when you realize that there is no point of investing in a project.
There Is No Hard Cap And No Minimum Limit For Investments
This one is a really serious red flag! If there are no limits, it means that the scammers want to collect as much money from investors as possible without making any efforts at all, which means you should stay away from investing in such projects because they will most likely never be successful.
In addition, if there is no delay between ICO rounds and pre-sales, it usually suggests that the developers don’t actually care about your money; instead, they want to get rich quickly without any effort and then disappear into thin air.
