Imagine talking to the CEO of a favorite crypto project that you liked, including two extra team members on video call, and they managed to confuse you that they are picking few numbers of people to invest into the second seed round at a cheaper rate per token? They got him good, he was too excited and all sense of curiosity was shut down.
How does this sound to you, I just think your friend was being ignorant and the Idea of him investing into his favourite project made him become very vulnerable. How can he think they were real when we have AI all over everything on the internet. Does he know the voice of the founder to use that to make his judgement. If a project is looking for funding, they go to VC and not ordinary people on the internet and when they want investment from the public they do a crowdfunding through ICO or IEO. Your friend should have gotten the hit that they're scammers from the movement they contacted him directly because that's how scammers operate but when we want to be stupid, our reasoning leaves our body so I won't blame him much but just his enthusiasm to make good investments.
Be on the look out guys, anytime you found any CEOs or notable people online telling you to do something or sending some transactions, please do not rush, take a minute, relax and do some research first or just look away.
If it's too good to be true than it usually is, you do not need to ask all those questions, just ignore them when you get contact from them. Unless you're a public figure yourself just know nobody legit is contacting you for investment. Scammers target vulnerable people to try to steal money from.them and it's quite unfortunate that they still get success from this old trick and that's because people have failed to stay enlighten or they'll easily identify all this tricks.