By now, you all probably heard of this recent exit scam by SaveDroid and if you fell for it, I feel very sorry for you, but it's basically your fault. All I can hope for is that people didn't invest the money they could not effort to lose.
Anyway, this post is not about shaming people who made a mistake, but rather than a cautionary tale for people who are looking into investing into an ICO.
1) Do NOT always trust reviewers online
People do a review of ICO for many reasons. The 2 most common things are fame and money. The more reviews they do, the more chance they have at making money. Organizers of ICO would do anything to get your attention and sponsored review is just one way of doing it. If you want proof, start reviewing every projects on ICO Bench and see how far it will get you even if you have 0 experience in crypto and simply copy a review from somewhere else.
With that said, there are a few people I go to for an honest review. I will not list them here because it's your job to do your own research and identify these people.
Anyway, I just wanted to save this image here for a historical record and a reminder to think twice people trusting any of the reviewers below.
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20180418115754/https://icobench.com/ico/savedroid
2) Do your own research by reading the white paper
There is simply no substitution to reading the white paper. You can seek help in understanding certain concept, but if it still doesn't make sense to you, you probably should not be investing in it. Otherwise, it's just gambling. It's 2018 and if you google for an explanation of something complex, you will almost always find a simpler explanation somewhere. It could be wikipedia, YouTube, etc. Pick a medium you trust and really make sure you understand it.
3) Hype doesn't always get you far
Do not trust the number of subscribers on a Telegram channel without making sure you understand where they got the subscribers from. Many of them run a campaign to get people to invite as many people as they can to the channel in exchange for very small number of tokens (which in my opinion is never worth it). I have seen many channel gone from 2k to 20k in the matter of 24 hours. This is not normal.
4) Ask the right questions
When a project claim to be able to scale up to 1m transaction/sec, keep asking them for the proof and even if they show you the number, make sure they didn't just make it up. Stop asking "when moon?", "when lambo?", "when exchange?". You really will not get very far with this crypto stuff.
Lastly...
Keep in mind that even the most experienced person can be full and that's probably what happened to some of the reviewers above. One of the best ways I found is to simply talk to the team and somehow seek ways to talk to someone that knows them personally. There have been many projects that the more you push, the more obvious that it's a scam. Keep in mind that I also count project with the promise of something that is obviously not achievable as a scam. For example, there's a certain ICO (starting with V) promising to have 1 million users on the platform by end of this year and also have their platform deployed in thousands of businesses even though they don't even have a test net. By simply comparing the number to the growth of known social network or retail platform, one could immediately sense some BS (well, I hope most people do). They also got very defensive rather than trying their best to find some source of believable justification. Something was wrong.
If you smell something fishy, just walk away from it. Only you can protect your own money. You can't really blame anyone else. Good luck and stay investing...intelligently.