Apate.ai Deploys AI Agents to Trick Scammers and Gather Fraud Intelligence

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Australian startup Apate.ai uses thousands of AI agents posing as victims to engage scammers and collect detailed fraud intelligence. Their insights help banks, telcos, and agencies strengthen anti-fraud efforts.

Apate.ai, an Australian startup founded in 2024 based on research from Macquarie University, has developed an innovative approach to combat fraud by deploying thousands of AI agents that pose as potential victims to engage and waste scammers’ time. These agents interact with fraudsters across various channels including phone calls, messages, emails, and social media, pretending to be diverse individuals of different ages, genders, accents, and languages.

Unlike typical AI applications aimed at automation or efficiency, Apate’s agents deliberately keep scammers engaged to glean useful intelligence. Over 2.5 million conversations, the startup’s fleet has reportedly wasted around 17 years of scammers’ collective time. More importantly, these interactions aim to coax scammers into revealing critical details such as bank accounts, crypto wallets, phone numbers, malicious websites, and impersonated brands—information generally only available after someone has fallen victim.

Apate’s customers, including banks like Commonwealth Bank of Australia, telecom companies such as TPG Telecom, utilities, and government agencies, use the gathered intelligence to inform their fraud prevention strategies. TPG Telecom has redirected nearly 590,000 scam calls to these AI agents. Commonwealth Bank has experienced a 76% reduction in publicly reported scam losses, and another Australian bank has disrupted 22 scam campaigns through Apate’s outbound agents.

The company employs frontier AI models alongside proprietary fine-tuned systems, trained on scam conversation datasets and academic research. Customers access an insights portal that provides analytics on scams targeting their users, brands, and products. They can assign specific missions to agents, such as acquiring bank account or crypto wallet details, and deploy text agents to monitor forums and social platforms.

Apate’s concept was inspired by a personal experience of its founder and CEO, Dali Kaafar, who once kept a scammer on the line for 44 minutes, reflecting on how this wasted time might be automated and used to gather helpful data. Since then, the team has built technology to proactively engage scammers rather than responding after victims have suffered losses—the approach contrasts with traditional reactive fraud defenses.

The startup raised $8.15 million in seed funding in August 2026 and plans to invest in product development and international expansion, including offices in London and the U.S. The company’s name references Apate, the Greek goddess of deception, embodying its mission to deceive scammers for good. According to co-founder Brad Joffe, they even celebrate when scammers swear at their AI agents as a sign of frustration and engagement.

This proactive AI-driven anti-fraud strategy marks an evolution in scam-baiting, leveraging AI to turn the tables on increasingly sophisticated scammers who also use AI for deepfake voices and phishing. By directly targeting scammers with AI agents, Apate.ai provides clients with real-time, actionable threat intelligence that can prevent fraud before it happens.