Everybody knows that it's important to perform your due diligence before any investment in the ICO industry. But few people seem to understand what that actually means. One of our missions is to teach people how to spot a scam, rather than relying on others to do it for them. In the interest of increasing your own self-reliance and ability to outwit the scammers, we're presenting a new tutorial on how to validate image authenticity on ICO websites.
Know your templates
As we've mentioned before in our above-linked guide, many ICOs use ready-made website templates as a way to both present the ICO without a lot of effort and save money on web design. While some of these templates give ICOs a base structure and allows them to use it to create a very personalized page, others offer a completely generic pack with very few possible changes.
Becoming familiar with the most common ICO templates, and what they look like in their unmodified forms, is a valuable tool in your scam-prevention arsenal. One common red flag is when the ICO has not changed the default images that come with the scheme. Let us demonstrate.
In this case, we searched for the image of the mobile application presented on the website of Referpay Network, a known scam. This image was originally used in the template from which this website was created.
By simply searching this image, we found that more than 70 ICO websites had never changed this image and are still presenting it as their “app-to-be-developed” on their website. It didn’t stop there.
We went through each one of these websites to confirm that the actual image is still there. As we discovered two very interesting things:
- The vast majority of these sites were scams. Luckily, about 90% of these scams had already ended in February. Unfortunately, there are 7 scams that are still active (which we will be publishing in the coming week). All initially connected by the same image. One of these scams has actually created a wallet app that looks exactly like the image, yet does nothing.
- Although the majority of the websites had a false link to the various application stores, some of the sites had links for the HB Wallet app on all the stores. We followed up with HB Wallet, and they stated that there is no connection between them and these wallets.
Image searching: quick, easy, necessary
This is a great example of how important it is to Google the images used on an ICO's website. This wasn't a team member's profile picture or something buried in the whitepaper, it was prominently displayed as the mobile app image.
But how do you search for an image? It couldn't be easier! Simply right click on the image, and click on “Search Google for image”. See many results, from different sources, containing that image? Congratulations, you have found a stock picture.
Not sure which image to Google? Since it's so quick and easy, we recommend searching every image that presents information about the ICO. Team members, apps, charts, and graphs should all be investigated. And remember, you can save yourself a lot of search time by familiarizing yourself with the most common ICO templates and the images they use, so that you'll recognize them when you see them later. The more you research and investigate ICO websites, the more you'll start to develop a hunch about what images have been carried over from the default or stolen from other sites.
Finally, don't think that just because a project is launching a security token offering (STO) that they aren't a scam. You can and should use this same technique for STOs and any other form of crypto investment.
We hope that this guide will help you in your efforts to spot ICO scams!