AI Undercover Agents Get Scammed to Fight Fraud: Apate's Bold New Strategy

Apate.ai, an Australian startup founded in 2024 based on research from Macquarie University in Sydney, is redefining the fight against cybercrime by intentionally deploying AI agents to get scammed. Unlike most companies that leverage AI to accelerate product development or streamline workflows, Apate.ai sends its AI fleet undercover, masquerading as unsuspecting victims to bait fraudsters.

Thousands of these sophisticated AI agents are engineered to interact with scammers across various platforms, including answering scam calls, responding to deceptive messages and emails, following phishing links, and infiltrating social media groups. These agents are designed to adopt diverse personas, complete with varying ages, genders, accents, and languages, all while strategically engaging scammers long enough to extract actionable intelligence.

The company reports significant success, stating its fleet has collectively wasted an astonishing 17 years of scammers’ time across 2.5 million conversations. Crucially for its clientele, which includes banks, telecom companies, government agencies, and utility providers, these undercover agents diligently work to uncover critical information typically only obtained after a real victim has been defrauded. This intelligence encompasses details such as scam-related bank accounts, cryptocurrency wallets, phone numbers, malicious websites, the brands being impersonated, and other specifics about ongoing scam operations.

Apate.ai, a finalist at TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield 200, funnels this invaluable data back to its customers. This allows them to proactively strengthen their anti-fraud measures and initiatives. The startup's innovative approach marks a significant evolution in scam-baiting, particularly timely given the increasing sophistication of AI-empowered scammers and hackers. The FBI, for instance, reported over 22,000 complaints of AI-related crimes in 2025, leading to approximately $893 million in losses, with a substantial $632 million from investment scams where fraudsters exploit AI for conversations and deepfake technologies.

The genesis of Apate.ai traces back to a real-life scam call experienced by its founder and CEO, Dali Kaafar. Several years ago, during a family picnic, Kaafar received a scam call and, for the amusement of his children, deliberately kept the scammer engaged for 44 minutes. This experience sparked an idea: to automate this process to not only waste scammers' time but also to gather useful information. This led to his research at Macquarie University, where he and his colleagues utilized machine learning and natural language processing to analyze scam call content and develop advanced detection and prevention methods.

Brad Joffe, co-founder and chief commercial officer, emphasized Apate.ai's proactive stance: "Most of the industry works after the fact. Telcos block numbers, but scammers just get new ones. Banks watch transactions, but by then the scammer has already reached the customer. We go to the scammer directly and get the information before anyone gets hurt." He further explained that their AI agents engage tens of thousands of scammers daily across various digital channels, providing customers with critical insights derived from these interactions.

Apate.ai powers its agents and analytical capabilities using a combination of frontier models and its own fine-tuned models, which are continuously trained on conversations with scammers and Kaafar's foundational research. Beyond access to the agent fleet, customers receive an insights portal offering detailed intelligence and analytics pertinent to scams targeting their users, employees, brands, and products. Customers can even assign specific missions to these agents, such as retrieving a particular bank account number or crypto-wallet address. Text agents can also proactively scour forums, investment groups, and social platforms for potential scam activity, then engage with fabricated identities to unearth scammer details.

The company boasts impressive results with its clients, including Commonwealth Bank of Australia, TPG Telecom, and other government agencies and utilities. TPG has redirected nearly 590,000 calls to Apate’s agents. Commonwealth Bank has observed a 76% reduction in publicly reported scam losses. An unnamed Australian bank has successfully disrupted 22 scam campaigns using Apate’s outbound agents.

Investors are recognizing the potential in this innovative approach, with Apate.ai securing $8.15 million in seed funding in August from Lobby Capital, OIF Ventures, Investible, Concept Ventures, and Baobab Ventures. With a total of nearly $10 million raised, the 20-person company plans to allocate its latest funding towards product development and significant international expansion, including establishing an office in London and expanding its presence in the U.S.

Reflecting on the company’s identity, Joffe noted, "Apate is named after the Greek goddess of deception, which felt appropriate given what our agents do." He humorously added that the startup even showcases scammers swearing at their bots in pitch materials, stating, "We track that as a sign of frustration and every swear word gets celebrated by us at Apate. We are probably one of the only businesses in the world that celebrates when people swear at our product."