Avoiding being scammed in ICO “pump-and-dump” schemes

How to avoid being scammed: completely ignore the world of "coins" and other nonsense.

Ah the dot-com bubble 2.0. I think it&#x27;ll go down in history as the crypto-crash because that&#x27;s cool to say.<p>But seriously this is exactly what happened in the late 90&#x27;s during the rise of the web. There is real value in Bitcoin, there is real value in blockchain technology. There probably isn&#x27;t any value in PETCOIN or AOLCOIN if you catch my drift. Smart investors who can stomach risk can make a lot of money over the next few years before all the shit hits the fan. Gotta love irrational exuberance.

A pump-and-dump scheme drives the price up by promoting the commodity only to allow insiders who bought it earlier to sell when the price peeks just before the the price plunges again.<p>You can easily see it in penny-stocks and&#x2F;or OTC-stocks. The price stays flat, then peaks, then crashes to about the pre pump-and-dump price.<p>I haven&#x27;t seen such a behaviour in any of the new coins. Does anyone have an example or link to a chart?

Just to provide more options to the discussion and because nobody has mentioned it: Have you considered that all ICOs are a scam of some sort? Or that you can participate in scams and still end up being a winner?<p>To get the noodle baking about the first part: The goal of every public offering is to make more money than what the stuff you&#x27;re offering is worth to you. Of course it may have more value to other people for different reasons, but the basic idea is not to get the same value or less of what it&#x27;s worth to you. So to some degree an ICO always plans to take more than it gives.

The irony of ICOs is that the very purpose nearly forbidden by the SEC and other global regulators -- namely issuing securities of a company -- is the most natural fit.<p>Nobody wants a domain specific currency. If I want to purchase services whether it&#x27;s from a company or from some kind of decentralized amorphous protocol I want to make that purchase in fiat cash or some general purpose crypto cash like BTC or ETH. I do not want to convert cash into some domain specific currency. That&#x27;s annoying and introduces complexity, breakage, and market inefficiency.

A digital &quot;growth&quot; company is working within my vicinity and helping ICOs success. I&#x27;m really having issues with that.<p>Regular crowd-funding mostly have rules about what you pre-buy. Regular IPOs have tight rules and regulation on how, when and to whom you may offer.<p>I fail to see how and why we should tolerate these ICOs scams these days. A lot of people will lose a lot of money.

I wonder if there is an opportunity here for an unbiased certification process that ICO founders can request. Sort of like a Morningstar rating.

The worst schemes are the &quot;Oh No, we&#x27;ve been hacked during our ICO, stop sending those &#x27;other people&#x27; your money!&quot;

This is becoming more of a problem. That&#x27;s why I only stick to mining certain coins.

Filecoin only has a whitepaper and a website, and they raised how many millions?

Remember when people pretended bitcoin was a currency?

Who are the most recent scam coins?

And everyone think EOS.io are doing ico<p>They are not, Dan bytemaster was around when Satoshis was active back then

How about a modern investment project in construction industry based on blockchain technology? An ICO investment in the infrastructure of a plot of land in Russia, which will make you a 300% return. Of course, All transactions will be securely processed in Ethereum Virtual Machine and stored in a blockchain – distributed database on numerous nodes around the globe. Decentralized consensus gives Ethereum extreme levels of fault tolerance, ensures zero downtime, and makes data stored on the blockchain forever unchangeable and censorship-resistant.