Apate Secretly Sends AI Agents to Be Scammed in Order to Gather Fraud Intelligence

Most companies use AI agents to ship products faster or speed up workflows. Apate.ai secretly sends them out to be scammed.

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Most companies use AI agents to ship products faster or speed up workflows. He sends them secretly to be deceived.

Founded in 2024 based on research at Macquarie University in Sydney, this Australian startup deploys thousands of artificial intelligence agents posing as innocent victims. These agents can answer scam calls, respond to suspicious messages and emails, follow phishing links, and join social media groups to prey on scammers. They pretend to be people of all walks of life, of different ages, genders, accents, and speak different languages, trying to keep scammers engaged enough to learn something useful.

The company says its fleet of agents has wasted 17 years of fraudsters' time in 2.5 million conversations so far. More importantly for Apate's client base of banks, telecommunications companies, government agencies and utilities, undercover agents try to get fraudsters to reveal things about themselves that would normally only be known after the victim has been defrauded: bank accounts, crypto wallets, phone numbers, malicious websites, brands they impersonate, and other details they're spoofing about.

Apate, a Startup Battlefield 200 finalist at TechCrunch Disrupt, then provides that information to its clients to use to inform their anti-fraud initiatives and actions (The company will host a panel of VC judges at Disrupt, which runs this week at Moscone West in San Francisco through Thursday, October 15.)

It's a strange evolution in scam bait, but not too surprising given how much AI has empowered fraudsters and hackers. The FBI received more than 22,000 complaints of AI-related crimes in 2025, resulting in $893 million in damages. More than $632 million of that amount came from investment scams, in which the FBI says fraudsters use artificial intelligence to run conversations and fake the voices and appearances of celebrities, executives and trusted figures.

For a long time, people played pranks on scammers on purpose - sometimes hilariously, like making the scammers read entire books out loud or even get ridiculous tattoos. Now, with the ever-growing capabilities of artificial intelligence, the tables are turning.

Interestingly, the idea behind the app was sparked by an actual scam call.

Several years ago, Apat founder and CEO Dolly Kaffar was at a family picnic when he got a call from an unknown number. Realizing a scammer was on the line, she decided to play dumb for her kids' sake and managed to keep the call going for 44 minutes.

Everyone laughed, but the disbelievers realized that it was 44 minutes the scammer had not spent contacting an actual victim. It was also 44 minutes of wasted time that made him wonder: could he automate it and learn something useful in the process?

This idea eventually led to research work at his workplace at Macquarie University, where Kafer and his colleagues used machine learning and natural language processing to uncover the content of fraudulent calls and develop better ways to detect and prevent fraud.

Brad Joffe, co-founder and chief business officer, told TechCrunch: "Most of the industry works after the fact. Telecoms block numbers, but fraudsters just get new numbers. Banks see transactions, but by then the fraudster has already reached the customer. We go straight to the fraudster and get the information before anyone gets hurt." "Our AI agents talk to tens of thousands of fraudsters every day via calls, texts, emails and the web. What we offer our clients is something that comes out of those conversations and they can do something with it."

Joffe said Apat uses both its frontier models and fine-tuned models to power its factors and analysis. The company trains its models based on conversations its agents have had with fraudsters, as well as research Kaafar has done at Macquarie.

In addition to access to Apate's fleet of agents, customers gain access to an Insights Portal that provides information and analytics on fraud targeting end users or employees, brands, products and more. Customers can even delegate specific tasks to these agents, such as obtaining bank account numbers or crypto wallet addresses. Its contextual agents can search forums, investment groups, and social platforms for possible fraudulent activity, and then enter conversations with fake identities to reveal the details of fraudsters.

The startup's clients include: Commonwealth Bank of Australia, TPG Telecom, as well as other service companies, telecommunications and government agencies. TPG has diverted nearly 590,000 calls to Apate agents, the Commonwealth has seen a 76 percent reduction in publicly reported fraud losses, and an unnamed Australian bank the startup works with has used its outbound agents to disrupt 22 fraud campaigns, Joffe said.

Investors are betting there's money to be made from scamming scammers, too. Apat 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 spend the latest round on international and product development, including opening an office in London and establishing a larger presence in the United States.

"Apate is named after the Greek goddess of deception, which seems appropriate given what our agents do," Joffe said. And he added that the startup even shows scammers swearing at bots in its content.

We follow it as a sign of desperation and any swearing is celebrated by us in Apate. "We're probably one of the only businesses in the world that celebrate when people swear by our product."

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