18 May 2018 00:00, UTC

The new review made by the journalists from WSJ tells that out of 1450 analyzed ICOs, 271 of them (or 18.69%) were scams.

“Hundreds of Bitcoin wannabees” show fraud properties, the press outlet tells. Most common features of a fraudulent ICOs the employees of WSJ have encountered were:

Promises of high returns

Fake info on celebrity support

Fake photos of founders

The deep analysis of whitepapers proves extremely useful, as in 111 cases (7.66%) these materials were plagiarized from other sources.

By using the modern means of open-source intelligence (OSINT), reporters found out that the toxic 18% of projects have gathered over $1 billion. This leads to believe that the digital currency community should come up with a good way to prevent this massive scam parade, or else the reputation of the sphere amongst the fiat market participants would not develop at all.

A possible answer is the mechanism invented by Upbit - rewards are given in exchange for new frauds revealed to this crypto brokerage platform. If implemented widely, this may decrease the percent of discovered scams in the future market studies.

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