To be honest, my best way to identify a fake project is through reviews! I will write a post about that exchange in three different forums and I will compare all the reviews.
There are some projects that I will review them on youtube as well, but not all because some of them are paying for fake reviews.

If it's an exchange you can use those which have been listed in CMC, Coingecko and etc from 1 - 30 maybe.