Cryptocurrency Investigation: Spotting Scams, Scams, and Real Projects

When you hear cryptocurrency investigation, the process of examining crypto projects to uncover truth behind marketing claims. Also known as crypto due diligence, it's what separates people who keep their money from those who lose it to fake airdrops, ghost exchanges, and empty tokens. Most crypto losses don’t come from price drops—they come from not asking the right questions before you click "Connect Wallet."

A crypto scam, a deceptive scheme designed to steal crypto assets under false pretenses doesn’t always look like a phishing email. Sometimes it’s a token with zero trading volume, no team, and a website that looks like it was made in 2017. Other times, it’s a "verified" airdrop asking for your seed phrase. The airdrop fraud, a tactic where fake token distributions trick users into approving malicious transactions is everywhere in 2025. Projects like DeHero HEROES, YAE Cryptonovae, and IMM all claimed to give away free tokens—but none were real. The only thing they delivered was drained wallets.

Behind every scam is a weak system. That’s where blockchain governance, the rules and processes that decide how a crypto network evolves comes in. Many projects fail not because their code is broken, but because their decision-making is. Vote buying, low quorum requirements, and anonymous founders let bad actors take over. You see this in governance attack vectors—where someone buys enough votes to change a protocol’s rules and steal funds. It’s not a hack. It’s legal within the system. That’s why knowing who controls a project matters more than the token price.

And then there’s crypto regulation, government rules that define what’s legal or illegal in digital asset use. Egypt banned crypto entirely. Hong Kong now requires licenses for every exchange. Cuba lets people use Bitcoin because they have no choice. Saudi Arabia doesn’t ban it—but warns you not to trust it. These aren’t just headlines. They’re red flags or green lights depending on where you live. A token that’s fine in one country could be illegal in another. If a project ignores regulation, it’s not innovative—it’s reckless.

What you’ll find below isn’t a list of top coins. It’s a collection of real investigations. We dug into zero-fee exchanges with no team. We checked if travel tokens were actually used by any airline. We confirmed which airdrops were fake before people lost money. We looked at why some projects vanished overnight. This isn’t theory. These are cases where someone asked: "Who’s behind this? What’s the proof? Does this even work?" And the answers saved people from disaster.