At a point the team start given excuses to abide by what they promised to do or stop communicating with the community then I can sense the project is scam. How do you determine a project is gone bad and won't fulfil it promise? What criteria do you use ? or you wait for years thinking all will be well ?
It should be before you start promoting or investing in the ICO, you can check the scam section for a report, in the scam section there are tools that you can use to trace these scammers, it's not easy but it's worth it because it will save you time and money and you can share your findings to all of us here.