If you are curious, find the projects telegram group and ask questions, and post screenshots on the group, I am positive that people will stop you from getting scammed, they will be exposed to you that you are about to get scammed, sadly we have gotten to this stage only to end up having more confusing tools for scammers, all we can do is warn each other of the threats that lurk
This is the first thing to do, and that's what I've been doing. It clears every doubt. We've all been victims one way or the other on various projects and we learnt from such experiences. I still won't blame the victim in your narrative. Scammers are very smart and they put in hardwork into their craft. Most of these scammers are developers and project members and they know the loopholes and how to make shortcuts around them.
For me, a few private sales I've been involved in were from insiders in the projects. I made so much mistakes in the past during the ICO days of 2017/18 that I lost interest in anything private sales. I'm building the interest again but it must be through reputable people I know who are insiders before I invest in any project this day. Sometimes we want to lose our guards in private sales because of the mouth watering ROI and then throw caution to the wind and not be guarded by our investment principles. We shouldn't do that. We ought to stick to whatever scrutiny parameters we use.