Apate.ai deploys AI agents posing as victims to gather intelligence on scammers

Centre · 2Apate.ai, an Australian startup founded in 2024 on research done at Macquarie University in Sydney, deploys AI agents that pose as innocent scam victims. 1 2 Centre · 2The agents can answer scam calls, reply to messages and emails, follow phishing links and join online groups, using different ages, accents, personalities and languages to keep scammers engaged. 1 2 Centre · 2The company says its agents have wasted 17 years of scammers' time across 2.5 million conversations; Gulf News says the figures were shared with TechCrunch. 1 2

Centre · 2While keeping scammers talking, the agents try to extract bank accounts, crypto wallets, phone numbers, malicious websites and the brands being impersonated, which Apate passes to customers such as banks, telecoms, government agencies and utilities to inform anti-fraud measures. 1 2 Centre · 2The idea came from founder and CEO Dali Kaafar, who at a family picnic played along with a scam call for 44 minutes and realised that was time the scammer could not spend on a real victim. 1 2 Centre · 2Customers include Commonwealth Bank of Australia and TPG Telecom; co-founder and chief commercial officer Brad Joffe told TechCrunch that TPG has diverted nearly 590,000 calls to Apate's agents, that Commonwealth has seen a 76% drop in publicly reported scam losses, and that an unnamed Australian bank used outbound agents to disrupt 22 scam campaigns. 1 2

Centre · 1Joffe said the agents run on both frontier models and Apate's own fine-tuned models, trained on past scammer conversations and Kaafar's research, and that customers get an insights portal and can assign agents specific missions such as obtaining a bank account number. 1 Centre · 2Apate raised $8.15 million in seed funding in August, bringing its total to just under $10 million according to Joffe, and plans to expand internationally, including a London office and a larger US presence; it is a finalist in the Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt. 1 2 Centre · 1TechCrunch puts the company in the context of AI-enabled fraud, citing the FBI's receipt of more than 22,000 AI-related crime complaints in 2025, with about $893 million in losses. 1

Centre · 2Apate says scammers sometimes swear at the bots, which it counts as a sign of frustration; the figures and customer results are the company's own claims and are not independently verified in the coverage. 1 2