“Wait, …so is this one a scam or not?”

It’s a question even the smartest investors are asking each other, more and more nowadays. The trend of pump and dump schemes isn’t going to diminish, and, in fact, it will soon escalate rapidly.

Even the most reliable sources are starting to unknowingly treat pump & dump schemes as if they were legitimate enterprises.

Ever-popular coinmarketcap.com is now flooded with scam-coins listed in their ranking boards, even if the coin’s sort-lived price inflation spike is due to shill transactions. Though, this isn’t fault of any individual nor any well-meaning organization.

The fact is that ICO scammer methods of disguise are becoming ever more creative and sophisticated. With potentially millions of dollars to be made, scammers have a great competitive incentive to use tactical optics/signals to trick unsuspecting investors of all levels.

The formula of a pump & dump scam is pretty simple:

1. Design a digital presence for the ICO that mimics the digital presence of legitimate ICOs
2. Invest in a short-run marketing hype cycle to rapidly raise the coin’s price
3. Sell everything and move on to the next scam

But how can we tell what’s a scam and what’s not?

It’s hard because the scammers methodically use the same signaling channels we all use to stay informed.
• Advertisements for scam ICOs appear in the same websites as legit ICOs
• Coinmarketcap’s listing appearances usually through a coordinated system of shill bids from insiders to give it the impression of a genuinely large market cap as well as an impression of incredible growth
• Identical (often cloned) web design, social media marketing, community management, and public relations strategies so to appear of identical caliber to that of successful and legitimate ICOs of the past
• Whitepapers are offered by the scam ICO, full of technical verbiage as well as disturbingly unsound math that few people bother to test

Usually on the surface everything looks the same (though not always) as a legitimate ICO. Slight mistakes on the surface can fail our smell test and then we start to get more suspicious and dig beneath the layers.

Looking deeper at the company — the people behind it, the transparency, the uniqueness, the mathematical soundness — can serve us as mental filter indicators to sieve only the coins that are legitimate.

But who can do that research for every coin?

As time goes on, we know a few things will happen:

1. Scam-coins and ICOs and their campaigns will come out at an accelerated pace and volume
2. Scammers will develop increasingly more sophisticated
3. Time for due diligence research on every ICO presented to us will dwindle down as we become busier as people
4. Thus, they will become harder to mentally filter, both on the surface and in deeper layers

The answer — researched rankings!

What I would like to see is a real-time ranking of traded coins and ICOs that is all-inclusive of every coin yet uses deeper scientific measures signaling exactly what we need to quickly mentally filter what would lose us money; to rate the real value of the coin.

Is that so hard? Come on, Internet, give us one.

Note: I originally published this on Medium