Unrealistic goals
Scam projects will often make bold claims about their product even though said project offers nothing new or disruptive. It’s not likely that a certain blockchain platform or cryptocurrency will end poverty, fix global warming or replace the internet. This can also be truth for how they expect the community or markets to respond to the product. If someone claims their cryptocurrency will replace Bitcoin, get a disproportionate amount of users, or increase by 100x in the price charts, you can add that project to the scam list.
If the project does have that potential, professional developers will never make such promises. They will let you know about the potential of their project and that’s it. No serious team will ever make a price prediction about their token or claim it can fix the world.
Buzzword salad
“Our decentralized blockchain-based platform will disrupt the landscape of cryptocurrency investment while building a trustless network of pseudonymous users that leverage swarm intelligence technology to provide real world financial services in a tokenized ecosystem.”
Sounds great, right? (Not really) Well, maybe I’m not as good as some scam artists are but that’s the gist of it. Buzzword salads look good but when you actually sit down to digest them, they taste like vague claims and empty promises. If you read through a paragraph and have learnt nothing new by the end, then there is probably nothing to learn.
Whitepaper
So maybe you saw the buzzword salad we just talked about but hoped to find something completely different in the Whitepaper. This can be true, as developers may try to simplify or hype up their product on the announcement or website and detail the actual tech behind it on the whitepaper. However, if the whitepaper is full of these same buzzwords with no clear meaning, no actual tech is discussed and only high-level descriptions are given, then this is definitely a scam.
Whitepapers usually explain how the platform works both on the high-level and specifically. This often includes charts, calculations, simulations, specifications and so forth. If your project claims that it is building some sort of decentralized service or token with new features and actually provides no explanation of how it works specifically, then just close the document and walk away.
A perfect example of this is deClouds. An ICO that turned out to be a complete scam with no product whatsoever. Their whitepaper is full of nonsensical claims which fooled many less than tech savvy users.