We study the extent of fraud in initial coin offerings (ICOs), and whether information disclosure prior to the issuance predicts fraud. We document different types of fraud, and that fraudulent ICOs are on average much larger than the sample average. Issuers who disclose their code on GitHub are more likely to be targeted by phishing and hacker activities, which suggests that there are risks related to disclosing the code. Generally, we find it extremely difficult to predict fraud with the information available at the time of issuance. This calls for the need to install a third party that certifies the quality of the issuers, such as specialized platforms, or the engagement of institutional investors and venture capital funds that can perform a due diligence and thus verify the quality of the project.

我们研究了首次代币发行（ICO）中的欺诈程度，以及发行前的信息披露是否预示了欺诈。我们记录了不同类型的欺诈，平均而言，欺诈性ICO比样本平均值大得多。在GitHub上公开其代码的发行者更有可能成为网络钓鱼和黑客活动的目标，这表明存在与公开代码有关的风险。通常，我们发现使用发行时可用的信息来预测欺诈非常困难。这就要求需要安装一个第三方来证明发行人的质量，例如专门的平台，或者需要机构投资者和风险投资基金的参与才能进行尽职调查，从而验证项目的质量。