We are now in a era where scam devs don't care about anonymity anymore, now they aren't willing to hide their faces, they will come out in the open, throw you some videos on YouTube and still run away with your money, if you are a newbie you need to have the following in mind when researching projects.
1. Visible team members don't mean they are scam free.
2. A audited smart contract project can still scam you.
3. Scammers can spend a lot on their website to make it look attractive just to make you invest your money.
4. High volume on the listed exchange doesn't make a project clean from going scam.
in this case not only for beginners but for all cryptocurency users should know this because scammers will not target beginners or legends but all crypto users. so in my opinion before making an investment it is certain that we do research on the altcoin we want to invest or DYOR. because without doing research will be high risk for yourself.
Scammers didn't care so much about who you are. Scammers only care about your money. It's all about money. scammers were doing everything caused by the got attracted by money. A deep research is always needed to avoid the scammer but sometime even scammers were acting like they were legit developers. This is the most difficult part to know that. It can be seen from how tokenomic is working. DYOR is a must but sometime it will be so difficult.