If you follow Cryptocurrency news, you probably already saw that AdEx ICO started earlier today.

By the time I'm writing this post it's almost successfully funded. Currently at 89%.

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Let's take a look at it.

What is AdEx?

AdEx is a blockchain-based ad exchange aiming at disrupting the existing online advertising landscape and address its significant problems: advertising fraud, privacy and consent to receiving sponsored messages, etc.
AdEx is completely transparent and built on top of Ethereum smart contracts.
We believe we can empower advertisers and publishers with a platform that is secure, transparent and beneficial for all the parties involved in the process, consumers included.

Why is this a scam alert? Is it a scam?

You can check out their whitepaper here.
According to u/goatsareokay's research "AdEx's whitepaper, which is very new, bears striking similarities to Qchain, BAT and adChain's whitepapers. AdEx's whitepaper is more simplified, but when you compare them more closely, you can see a parallels in writing style and paragraph structure that are too similar to be coincidental. AdEx seems to have just simplified things that BAT, Qchain and adChain already wrote."

You can find examples here: http://imgur.com/a/BC72d
Source.

You can find the CEO of AdEx's reaction to the Reddit thread here.

Another analysis by bitcointalk.org user.

Fully detailed analysis can be found here.

TL;DR

Less than one month between publishing website/white paper and having the ICO. No clear idea about what the product is and no sign of development. White paper contains many parts that are highly plagiarized from multiple competitors. Leadership has shown a track record of dishonesty, copying others' work, and censoring criticism. Multiple team members, advisors, and partners are ethically and/or legally suspect (including Jihan Wu and Bitmain, who sold people Bitcoin miners that included a hashrate-sabotaging backdoor, and the AdEx co-founders' previous project Stremio, which is basically a convenient way to pirate movies/TV). Stay away.