Generally if someone is offering you crypto directly even if the ICO hasn't even ended yet chances are you are holding a shitcoin/scamcoin, if there is even an ICO you wouldn't even receive the crypto earlier. Aside from that you even have searched for any background information for the cryptocurrency exchange, I don't even know why you have continued to make that transaction even though you failed to receive any kind of information with that crypto exchange. The good thing here is you did your due diligence on searching everything about this crypto and the crypto exchange but the wrong thing you did is you still continued to go with that deal even if you have seen a lot of red flags as a warning.
A big mistakes always happening on newbies side which is not properly researching on the platform introduced to them and they are always late when they are in trouble that's why next time people should research first since for sure they will find more information posted on internet regarding on the platform or any similar to that.
Hopefully OP learn a lesson from that loss and better move on to the next chapter also stay away on the ICO's
There are more valuable things than investing on ICO's, Learn trading OP since that is more legit than anything offered investment opportunities to you by the people who know you.
He did research on it but the problem here is even if the OP have seen a lot of red flags prior to the deal he still push through with the deal which for me is a bad decision making on his side. He didn't really lack on doing research as proven by how he have found out a lot of things after as proven what he had posted in the OP the problem here is why he had agreed with the transaction. To be honest this mistake is one of those where you will learn the most as anyone who will fall for this even though they have seen a lot of red flags beforehand will really learn from this mistake.