Well, common sense has to play a role as well...
Even TradeFortress' lending site didn't pass the sniff test. I also suspected ukyo & graet were trying to get rich playing the spread between their loans and the ones TradeFortress was brokering and thus kept a close eye on them selling off my stake as soon as they became unresponsive.
Touché. At a certain point, it became blazingly clear that TradeFortress's operation did not have the capital to cover potential withdrawals; I alluded to this publicly when TF first floated the idea to start clearing out his "investment" fund via Inputs.io, only to be brushed off, naturally.
As for Ukyo.Loan, I had originally been an aggressive buyer on behalf of the BTC Growth fund, eventually holding nearly 12% of the entire thing; but once it became very clear that the operation was headed south, I took the fund out of that position swiftly and entirely.
I don't see how Neo was an 'obvious scam'. If i was going to cut and run I wouldn't waste a load of money on office space, employees and newspaper and TV advertising after the IPO was closed. A flawed business plan possibly but a scam from the start, I don't see it.
Perhaps scam is a bad description. It was obvious that the operation was a money furnace and of course you would waste money on advertising after the IPO...
Neo was not worth touching with a barge pole: regardless of whether it was actually intended as an outright scam, it was a transparently atrocious business plan. IMHO, no experienced investor would have gone near it in the fiat world, yet in Bitcoin land many folks seem willing to overlook all manner of flashing red lights that would otherwise be deal-killers.