Apate Sends AI Agents Undercover to Get Scammed and Collect Fraud Intelligence

Most companies use AI agents to ship products faster or speed up workflows. Apate.ai sends them undercover to get scammed. The Australian startup was founded in 2024 on research done at Macquarie University in Sydney. It deploys thousands of AI agents that pose as ordinary victims. The agents answer scam calls, reply to suspicious messages and emails, follow phishing links and join social media groups to bait fraudsters. They take on personas of different ages, genders and accents, and speak various languages, all to keep scammers talking long enough to learn something useful. Wasting Scammers’ Time, Gathering Intelligence Apate says its agents have so far wasted 17 years of scammers’ time across 2.5 million conversations. For its customers, which include banks, telecom companies, government agencies and utilities, the more valuable result is what the agents extract. They try to get scammers to reveal details usually learned only after someone has been defrauded: bank accounts, crypto wallets, phone numbers, malicious websites, the brands being impersonated and other specifics of the scheme. Apate passes that information to customers, who use it to shape their anti-fraud measures. The company is one of the finalists in the Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt, which runs at Moscone West in San Francisco through Thursday, October 15, where it will pitch a panel of venture capital judges. AI Is Empowering Scammers Too The approach is a notable evolution of scam-baiting, a hobby in which people deliberately string scammers along, sometimes getting them to read entire books aloud or even get ridiculous tattoos. It also reflects how much AI has strengthened fraudsters. The FBI received more than 22,000 complaints of AI-related crimes in 2025, resulting in roughly $893 million in losses. More than $632 million of that came from investment scams, in which the FBI says criminals use AI to run conversations and to deepfake the voices and appearances of celebrities, executives and other trusted figures. A Picnic Call That Sparked the Idea The idea came from a real scam call. Several years ago, founder and CEO Dali Kaafar was at a family picnic when an unknown number rang. Realizing it was a scammer, he played dumb for the benefit of his kids and kept the call going for 44 minutes. Everyone laughed, but Kaafar noticed those were 44 minutes the scammer wasn’t spending on a real victim. That led him to wonder whether the process could be automated, and whether something useful could be learned along the way. The question led to research at Macquarie University, where Kaafar and colleagues used machine learning and natural language processing to analyze the content of scam calls and develop better ways to detect and prevent them. Going to the Scammer First Co-founder and chief commercial officer Brad Joffe told TechCrunch that most of the industry works after the fact. Telcos block numbers, but scammers simply get new ones. Banks monitor transactions, but by then the scammer has already reached the customer. Apate, he said, goes to the scammer directly and gets information before anyone is hurt. Its agents talk to tens of thousands of scammers daily across calls, messages, email and the web. Joffe said the company uses both frontier models and its own fine-tuned models to power its agents and analysis, trained on the agents’ conversations with scammers and on Kaafar’s Macquarie research. Customers also get an insights portal with intelligence and analytics on scams targeting their users, employees, brands and products. They can assign agents specific missions, such as obtaining a bank account number or crypto wallet address. Text agents can search forums, investment groups and social platforms for scam activity, then join conversations under a fabricated identity to surface scammers’ details. Customers and Results Apate’s customers include Commonwealth Bank of Australia and TPG Telecom, along with other utilities, telcos and government agencies. According to Joffe, TPG has diverted nearly 590,000 calls to Apate’s agents, Commonwealth has seen a 76% drop in publicly reported scam losses, and an unnamed Australian bank has used the outbound agents to disrupt 22 scam campaigns. Funding and Expansion Apate raised $8.15 million in seed funding in August from Lobby Capital, OIF Ventures, Investible, Concept Ventures and Baobab Ventures. Joffe said the 20-person company has raised just under $10 million in total and plans to use the new round for product development and international expansion, including a London office and a larger US presence. The company is named after the Greek goddess of deception. Joffe added that Apate even features scammers swearing at its bots in its pitch material, tracking it as a sign of frustration. The team celebrates every swear word, he said, making it probably one of the only businesses that cheers when people curse at its product.