Basically approach everything like it's a scam, and only start to trust them if they prove to be otherwise, there is nothing wrong with that. I mean if you start thinking "this is a scam project" at the very start, that means they will work hard to prove to you they are not, and they will not do it personally to you like you are the only investor, so you just check what they do and what they provide, and that will be fine.
Look at pinksale, between audit, kyc, safu and many other stuff, they end up getting the projects to be a lot bigger and so forth. This means that if they keep working towards that, you get to see what they are working on, and then you can decide if they are actually good or not, and that will help you out a lot.
This may sound as inappropriate to some people out there, however we gain nothing by being nice and we gain a lot for not trusting at all on the developers behind all of those projects.
So anyone thinking about investing in any project needs to assume that the project is a scam, and as soon as they find something wrong with it no matter how small then such project needs to be discarded immediately, now this may seem like a standard that is too high for most projects to pass, but that is the whole point about doing this.