It's actually not that risky if you do lots of research. Its risky for the idiots that throw money at anything that is hyped up with lots of advertising.
I'd agree. ICO investing is 100% profitable if you're going with insider information, are a partner or know somebody close to the group. Usually if you're pooling money (minimums don't have to be that high, only around 1-2BTC per person and a group buy can be $100K-2M) to get a sweet deal.
2 main ways of profiting: If you're pooling or have enough capital to get a discounted rate during seed investment rounds / private rounds, you can dump on the public investors with a 20-40% margin if it's a reputable ICO. If it's a scam ICO, you can get 50-100% probably but it's so much riskier.
Or the ethical route is avoiding dumping and hopefully the ICO gets pumped so that you're able to get 10x+ returns when it's long-term offloading.
Collusion isn't illegal in the ICO world yet, and of course it's all around us. So you're either in on the action or you invest just enough that won't make you shed any tears were you to lose it all.