The "Useless Ethereum Token" [1] subtitles itself as so:
You're going to give some random person on the internet money, and they're going to take it and go buy stuff with it. Probably electronics, to be honest. Maybe even a big-screen television.
Seriously, don't buy these tokens.
And people still invested more than $40.000 in it [2].
Bad example. That's one ICO I would actually buy into myself if I discovered it in time. I'm a believer in timely executed jokes, much like many other people on the Internet.
What's particularly alarming about that is he appears to have had at least three people purchase his service, two of them after the first had commented that it was substandard...
You know a market's full of suckers when even the wannabe scammers aren't discerning enough to avoid being ripped off.
Over last couple of weeks, I received a dozen or so contact requests on LinkedIn from "Blockchain and ICO experts". They don't have any other verifiable jobs on their resumes.
A whitepaper is not a contract. It's a description of "what does this do and why should you care", i.e. literally the thing you're buying into in an ICO.