"is EVERY ico a scam??"

Answering this question only addresses the tip of the iceberg. Even if an ICO is not a scam project, there is also a chance that the project may not take off.

Research has shown that 80% of ICOs are scams, and 90% of startup fails... that means almost only 1 out of 50 ICO projects will give you some kind of returns. The odds are not in the favour of ICO investors, period.

Having said that I'm sure you can greatly increase your odds if you've done your homework on the ICO you are investing in. I still stick to my crypto motto - don't put in anything you cannot lose.

Good luck everyone!

p.s. I've organised an ICO before for my ex-company and advised on some. if you have any questions about ICOs let me know - I'll try my best to answer  

1) To be honest, I'm not sure how bookkeeping will be done, it will only be due at the end of the year and I'm sure it is going to be tricky. The accounting and auditing landscape here is not very defined when it comes to crypto investments. Because ICOs are so new, no one really knows how that will be managed.

If someone has the answer about how that's done in SG, or in your country I would like to hear them! Also, do crypto investors typically need to pay 'tax' for their gains? And how do they track that?

2) Unfortunately, beyond the typical one-page legal disclaimer at the start of the document that says 'participate at your own risk', there is really nothing much to protect the investors from. For our case there is no buy-back scheme offered in the whitepaper - is it common for other ICOs to do that though?

I would like information on this as well! 

So far I've joined the @CryptoSG groups on Telegram. They have many subgroups there for different stuff like events, newbies etc.

1) Utility token.
2) Not open to US and China residents. We are based in Singapore so yes we did take into account KYC regulations in anticipation of Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) regulations.
3) The token has close of zero value at the moment. Many of the team members still hold a chunk of the token allocated to us, but no point selling so everyone is just parking it in their wallets now. Until the blockchain product is developed and the token has actual usage value, the token will stay at this price I think.
4) Yes, bounties were used. The bounty space was extremely crowded. We did get a lot of social media activities and such from the program, but all 'fake' interest.
5) Yea that's one of my biggest concern then as well. To be honest, anyone can call themselves an advisor and I think he is one of those. Again it was a desperate move, there wasn't much time to find or pay for a better ICO advisor.

Not really. We took whatever little money we had left from the company operation and invested into making the ICO. Monies raised from the private sale (before ICO) was also directed to fund all the marketing activities.

After the ICO, we managed to take back about 300K from the investors. But a big chunk of it was directed for Market Making to maintain the price of the token. We didn't end up with much...

I ran an ICO for my company before. We handled the KYC ourselves on our website and it was hacked by a so-called white-hat hacker. He/she showed us a screenshot with all the information of our KYC members and asked/demanded we give him a 'reward'.

If you are participating in an ICO try and make sure their KYC platform is secured, or you may risk losing your personal data (and exposing your embarrassing selfie)!

Short Answer: Take the rating with a pinch of salt. Spend more time reading the Whitepaper and evaluating the team.

Long Answer:
1) You can pay ICO rating sites to be listed as premium/hot/special/featured/editor's pick listings. These are the ICOs that appear right in your face on the home page so they can more visibility.
2) Ratings received by ICOs can vary greatly from one to another. And ICOs will only feature their best ratings on their website and omit the bad ones.
3) Do some homework and see who rated the ICO. ICOBench, for example, has Benchy (their bot) to do the first round of rating and typically gives quite a high score. Experts rating are supplemented later and usually pulls the overall score down.
4) Scores are not stagnant, it gets updated over time. It is often affected by things like social media activities, how active is their Medium blog etc.
5) On that note of point 4, many of these can be faked. It is common for ICOs to have bounty programs to increase their social media activities, add fake followers in their Telegram group etc.

[Note: I've been part of an ICO team before so I've seen all this happen before my eyes.]

Have heard many ICO investors in this forum asking for tips on which ICO to invests, what to look out for etc. Just wanted to share my story from inside the ICO world! Read on if you are interested...

I started working for a regular startup in late 2017. We were having problems getting sales in, our products were about 50%-70% ready, and funding was running out quickly; We had only about 2 months of runway left.

One day, a random connection approached my CEO and proposed for him to ran an ICO as it is the "fastest and easiest way to get funding". My boss was sold on the idea and everyone was roped in for the ICO project. As someone with zero crypto experience and tasked to put the whitepaper together, I had to learn everything about ICO from scratch, inspecting other ICO sites and copying the whitepaper structure from others.

The most surprising thing for me was that our ICO advisor said that our first draft of whitepaper which 3 of us put together in just two weeks was "Perfect", and "Better than most ICOs out there". All in all, it took us about 6 weeks to launch the ICO. [Note: that's how quickly and how easily someone can put together a whitepaper and ICO, so don't trust what you read out there so quickly]

Fast forward 6 months, we only raised 300K and most of the funds were spent back into marketing and market making (yes, you saw it right). Long story short, we kind of ended up where we started and now have a whitepaper to fulfil...

It was a great learning experience for me, but not so great for the company. I've since left the startup because I don't agree with some of the tactics used during the ICO (borderline lying and scheming if you ask me) by my CEO. I can't reveal which ICO I was involved in due to confidentiality issues, but I do hope that those involved get out before it's too late!

Just to be clear, I am all in on the idea of blockchain technology disrupting the future; just not so much for ICO. For those who are investing in ICO, be careful and only put in money you are prepared to lose!

I must say that unfortunately, this is so true. I've been on a team that did a pivot and conducted an ICO out of nowhere because the company is running out of operating funds. A random connection approached my boss and proposed for him to do an ICO as it is the "fastest and easiest way to get funding". We all got on board and the connection became our ICO advisor. Fast forward 6 months, we only raised 300K and most of the funds were spent back into marketing the ICO and market making. Long story short, we ended up where we started and a whitepaper to fulfil...