It seems to me that at the initial stage it is very difficult to detect fraud, since fraudsters also work and improve their skills in order to present information about the Project so that even more attentive and professional investors are deceived. Today, many cryptocurrency users are very attentive to the new project, and not as it was in 2016, and therefore even bad projects today look very attractive and promising.
The people that will always fall victim of scam more are investors that are more interested in pre ico, you know those investors only invest by faith and basically by the whitepaper that they read because no matter how much they try, they cannot verify the authenticity of a project from the beginning before they enter an exchange like those who wait for the project to enter an exchange first for them to fully verify if the project is according to what they promised and stand for or they have diverted from their main focus.
It is also when they have entered an exchange that you will get to know if the coin is really good to be held on to as a long term investment or just to be used as short term investment. The only way one can truly get to know a genuine project is when they have entered an exchange.