Always check the following when investing a substantial amount of money
Background, experience and SIZE of the team. Make sure there are experienced verified people (no fake linkedIn profiles with few connections or fake pics), you can google them easily and they are acting professionally. Team with less than 5-10 members sounds suspicious. There should be content specialists, editors, PR specialists, SMM specialists, community managers, designers, software specialists, and targeted advertising specialists.
Read the whitepaper carefully or related blogs/articles/FAQ to it from the creators. Or have somebody to read/check it for you. If the whitepaper contains a lot of superlatives, fairy-tales or non-cited sources, the ICO is certainly fake or the creators are just dumb. Whitepaper should be a legit scientific paper with cited sources.
Check their social media activity and people commenting/sharing/retweeting/TRUSTING the ICO and their trustworthiness and reputation. If there are any/a lot of fake profiles retweeting and liking posts, the ICO is probably a scam.
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