SCAM ICOS & How To Stay Safe.

This will be an analogy on what I have seen in the past weeks with investors and ICO organisers.
It is true that the FOMO is real and everyone wants to invest in a token that will be worth millions in the next couple of years.
The downside of it is that many people will go and get loans to make this happen.
It is true that if you take bigger risks, you have bigger chances of making a big success but one needs to be wise in making properly informed decisions to have a sustainable sucess .

I will be using SANTIMENT as a case study, I will talk about what they did well and what they did wrong.
I will also be talking about what many investors did well and what they did wrong and eventually wrap my rants up.

What Happened?
Some bad guys created a similar website to Santiment's website, and one of the got 4 transactions worth 68.6 Ether off some innocent crowd.
The bad guys did the following:

1. Cloned the website.
   
   The Real Santiment Website

The Fake Santiment Website

1. Advertised the cloned website

2. Infiltrate the chatrooms ( with names like slackbot, 0000 , etc) buy sending direct messages to investors to send ether to a random address.
   
   Direct messages from a "slackbot"

The total transaction on one of the addresses after the crowdsale

ICO ORGANISERS

• The first and the only thing I will say Santiment did wrong was the fact that they did not buy all domain names that are related to their brand; which makes it very easy for someone to clone their website with a similar name and infiltrate the crowd sale.
  If you are an ICO organizer, it will be in the interest of your reputation to consider security by locking up all domains that are similar to your domain name.
  

  Quick Fix

• One of the measures that Santiment kept in place was locking up the chat room so that announcements are only coming from one channel.
  *Santiment changed the address link of all the pictures on thier website to deface the cloned site that is making references to the images on the original website.
  
• Santiment and CFI sent emails , plus made endless announcements to everyone so that they can avoid the fake site.
• Flagged all the accounts on Etherum that they are FAKE SANTIMENT CROWDSALE ACCOUNT .
  

But despite all the plea, people still threw money on the scam site. Although the damage control saved alot of people including me as I m sure I may eventually goto the wrong site even after comparing them.

Investors
Sometimes when u need to click the send button, one should have a check to see that everything is ok before u throw money into the river but FOMO will not let.

• Many investors ignored the warning on wallet or let me say did not read it and just pressed the SEND button.
• The good thing is that most people that stayed informed in the group did not fall a victim.

Tips to stay safe includes:

• Becoming familiar with the token you are about to buy
• Be up to date on the discussion board.
• When going to a crowdsale website and you are not sure, go and click the right address on https://www.icoalert.com/ or some other reputable ICO listing sites.
• Finally, DONT EVER invest what you are not ready to loose.

Thanks for taking your time to read. I hope it all helps.
GOOD LUCK

Please comment your opinions , upvote, and #resteemit