Hello, a short note and a couple of facts about investing.
Scientists from the University of Pennsylvania found "Most ICO projects" lie "in their White Papers"
The researchers noted that most of the ICO-companies that guarantee complex smart contracts, in fact, do not have the appropriate code in their own protocols.
Of the TOP-50 projects, which experts analyzed, only 10 actually provided the declared smart contracts. Taking into account that only 56% of companies receiving investments by tokenail finish their work within four months after the ICO, conclusions are disappointing.

"One of the main problems of investors is that few people read White paper, the other error lies in blind trust in" white paper ". Investors rarely check the information described in WP and do not have the proper level of competence to check the open source of a project. This is enjoyed by a huge number of ICO organizers, who do not even bother to develop smart contracts that are stated in the technical documentation. You can not trust people, you need to trust the code, "the scientists note.
Here you can read the full report (source): papers.ssrn (Unfortunately since I'm new to this forum I can't publish external links, sorry)
Just a small report shows us:
"Qualitative ICOs received 70% of funding in 2017, although more than 80% of fund-raising campaigns turned out to be fraudulent"
"ICO received $ 11.9 billion in funding last year, of which 11 percent came to fraudsters - $ 1.34 billion. Almost all of them fell on three large start-ups"
"Researchers from Boston College analyzed 2,390 ICOs that took place before May 2018. 56% of them closed immediately after the fundraising."
"4% of ICO could not collect the required amount, and 3% of the coins did not go to the exchanges within three months after the end of the token."

Reading this information on the Internet, at first I was shocked by these figures, but I agree that these figures may not be exactly accurate, yet they are for me a strong argument to conclude that we are not educated in terms of investment. I wanted to clarify these points for myself, for one to share with you.
1. To begin with, let's start with the fact that the project should have low competition, there are dozens of identical projects related to real estate, banking, the usual payment system and so on. Probably out of ten identical projects, there will be only one or two, the rest either will not collect the necessary amount or they are scammers. Also, I would advise you to compare their white paper, it often happens that scammers simply copy it from an honest company.
2. The second rule that I have defined for myself is the mandatory presence of MVP. MVP is a minimum viable product, a small part of the product that you can experience at the investment stage in order to understand in practice what you are investing in. That is, it can be a set of basic functions of the product produced by the company.
3.Product - it must be in demand, it must solve some important problem of the user or society problem. For example, take the stock exchanges, thousands or more, in such quantity they are not needed by anyone. Personally, I have enough 10 exchanges, about 5 of them I go constantly, the rest I visit much less often.
4. Further it is necessary to examine the position of the need for blockchain the product, perhaps the product will exist without blockchain, for example, tokens for payment of a hotel or tokens of banana plantations, there are many such examples.
5. Scalability of the project. The project will be able to work not only in one city or country, but all over the world.
6. A road map, it must be realistic and understandable. It should be painted in detail.
7. Product demand, I mean this product will not only be used by you, think it will come in handy to your friend :? can be Mom :? or neighbor :? this is an important point to think about this many times.
8. The team. I already wrote about this on the forum, but I repeat, I read this rule at the beginning of my development in the crypto currency. Never pay attention to the fact that the project is advertised by a well-known person. This does not affect the technical part of the product.
Here are some criteria that define a good team.
CEO has an entrepreneurial experience. I participated in the management of several successful projects.
There is a person responsible for finance or organizational processes.
Most of the team must have experience in this market.
9.Token-consider the law of supply and demand. Will you need a token to someone other than you. Will they buy it?
10. The legal part of the project. Compliance with legislation. Well if the company is registered on a legal entity and is in such countries as Japan, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, the EU countries and so on.
Bad if the company is registered in offshore, most likely it's scammers and after they have collected money, they will run away with your money to them nothing will be. It is very simple to check this, each country has a list of taxpayers, if in such lists you do not find this person you can forget about this project.
an honest company is always ready to answer legal questions. Also you can always check each member of the team on the Internet, check their profile and other information if available. Always look for the name of the project in the search. Perhaps users have already written some important information.
Do not hesitate to ask questions in the chat room of the company you want to invest in.
Among other things, I visit the page of people who are directly looking for facts about scams in the crypto world. For example @icokaraulny (twitter) , as he has his own chat in "telegram" , there is a lot of interesting things! (Friends this is not advertising, this is my experience gained over my time)
Conclusion: I know that now one of the main questions of newcomers is how to define a fraudulent ICO, there are already many options for answers, but as it turned out this is not enough, this is only a superficial analysis. I'm not saying that I know a lot, I'm a user like you, I also do not want to fall into the clutches of scammers. Therefore I understand that there is a great need to develop. And do not whine that "once again I was deceived by the swindler." Yes, perhaps someone will seem that with such an analysis you can not invest at all in any projects. But believe me, it's better not to invest at all than to sponsor fraudsters, so that they bathe in luxury. In this case, I will choose to invest in my education and return with knowledge!
Thanks to everyone for reading the post and a special thank you to all the authors of those many articles that I re-read to learn it for myself.
Since I recently moved from bitcointalk to this forum, this list I published there from my account.