What is an ICO (Initial Coin Offering)?

 1) Read up on the ICO as much as possible

Check the ICO’s website, read the whitepaper, browse through their team page (the most important!) and even check their social networking pages and channels.

Beware If-

• The website looks unprofessional or looks like it was done in a hurry. Scammers only have time to steal money, while some might try to con their projects away by looking at every detail as possible so keep a watchful eye.

• Staff breakdown of founders, developers, and advisors look fictitious (Try to connect with any of the staff and understand the project from them, with social media it has become more accessible!) If the contacted person has no idea about the ICO, take a million steps away from the ICO.

• A fake ICO might use celebrities to attract your attention, don’t let a celebrity endorsement whether real (Could be a paid promotion with celebrities agreeing to without knowledge) or fake draw you into something you’ll regret later.

• Visit their discord, slack and telegram channels to ask questions. If the team refuses to answer and has no community manager handling the channels 24/7, this ICO is most probably a scam!

• The whitepaper is the backbone of the ICO, and if there is no whitepaper, you know the ICO is a scam. If there is a whitepaper available dig into it and you will notice some things that do not make sense

2) Guaranteed Profits

An ICO needs to be as straight as an arrow and not try to push an investor into taking part in its project by ensuring profits.

If you have noticed, the blockchain ecosystem is not one that is never certain and thus a promise of such nature conflicts with reality.

    BitConnect sparked interest with its Proof of Stake (PoS) interest rate that was giving interest rates of a whopping 10% per month in the beginning and then falling to 1.4% in the last few months of the ICO stage. BitConnect proved to be the most notorious ICO that succeeded in scamming by guaranteeing profits.

3) GitHub does not include the ICO’s source code

GitHub has become the go-to place to see computer codes with functionalities such as distributed version control and source code management. Thus bug tracking and feature requests are easy to partake.

If your ICO has an empty code repository, that proves that the so-called professional team is lazy and unwilling to perform their best for the company. An ICO would never bow down to the challenges of the public, and will always want to improve that the solution is valid enough to function.

Don’t fret if you’re not an expert in coding, merely check if the repository is active and is receiving regular updates. Feel free to ask about the code in helpful Blockchain Telegram channels, people in the Blockchain universe are always obliged to help.

4) Unthinkable Premines

Premining allows an ICO to give tokens to a select few people before the crowdsale goes live. It is usually to reward project contributors, developers, and investors. However, if you notice a majority being offered pre crowdsale, you have caught an ICO that is trying to draw with their shrewd tactics of stealing your money.

A popular example is Paycoin ICO, where a majority of tokens were available predevelopment and led to the owner being part of a $9 million exit scam.

Trust your gut instincts, and only invest if you are 100% sure. ICO’s have made startups bloom, and investors all over the world take part in products and services they believe in, but there are a couple of lazy masterminds who are spoiling the market.

These are just a few simple guidelines to avoids to get scammed. If you have any cryptocurrency then you can exchange it from largest platform for crypto conversion
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