In my opinion, only investors can protect themselves from scam ICO. It is necessary to evaluate projects more competently, rather than invest in everything. IMHO
it's very difficult for many people, so scam will exist always in various forms and lazy greedy people will be the victims for them.
They have used various ways to scam investors. Remember there was an ico called able that created smartcontract and then these scammers are erasing all of the social chat and run away with all of investor's money. As far as I know that these guys are from korea and it looks possible if there was a lot of scammers in these days