Apate's AI agents have wasted 17 years of scammers' time

Apate.ai says its fleet of AI agents has wasted 17 years of scammers' time across 2.5 million conversations — intelligence the Australian startup now sells to banks, telecom companies, government agencies and utilities.

Founded in 2024 on research from Macquarie University in Sydney, Apate deploys thousands of AI agents that masquerade as innocent victims. The agents answer scam calls, respond to shady messages and emails, follow phishing links, and join social media groups to bait fraudsters. They pose as people of different ages, genders and accents, and speak multiple languages to keep scammers engaged long enough to learn something useful.

The point is not the delay itself. The undercover agents try to get scammers to reveal details that are usually learned only after a real victim has been defrauded: bank accounts, crypto wallets, phone numbers, malicious websites, the brands being impersonated, and other information about the scams in progress. Apate feeds that intelligence to customers, who use it to shape their anti-fraud measures.

The stakes are large. The FBI received more than 22,000 complaints of AI-related crimes in 2025, resulting in about $893 million in losses. More than $632 million of that came from investment scams, in which the FBI says fraudsters use AI to run conversations and to deepfake the voices and appearances of celebrities, executives and trusted figures. Scammers now use the same class of tools Apate turns against them.

The startup is one of the finalists at this year's Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt, and will pitch a panel of VC judges at Moscone West in San Francisco through Thursday, October 15.

How do you automate a scam bait?

The idea came from a real scam call. Several years ago, Apate's founder and CEO Dali Kaafar was at a family picnic when an unknown number rang. Recognizing a scammer on the line, he played dumb for the benefit of his kids and kept the call going for 44 minutes.

Everyone had a laugh. But Kaafar noticed those were 44 minutes the scammer had not spent calling a real victim. They were also 44 minutes of Kaafar's own wasted time, which led him to a question: could he automate it, and learn something useful in the process?

That question became research at Macquarie University, where Kaafar and his colleagues used machine learning and natural language processing to uncover the content of scam calls and to develop better ways to detect and prevent scams. Apate grew out of that work.

The company positions itself against an industry that reacts after the damage. Co-founder and chief commercial officer Brad Joffe told TechCrunch: "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."

Joffe said the agents operate at scale: "Our AI agents talk to tens of thousands of scammers every day across calls, messages, email and the web. What we offer our customers is what comes out of those conversations, and what they can do with it."

What do customers actually get?

Apate uses both frontier models and its own fine-tuned models to power its agents and its analysis. The company trains its models on conversations its agents have had with scammers, plus the research Kaafar conducted at Macquarie.

Customers receive access to the agent fleet and to an insights portal offering intelligence and analytics on scams targeting their end users, employees, brands and products. Customers can also assign agents specific missions, such as obtaining a bank account number or a crypto-wallet address. Apate's text agents can search forums, investment groups and social platforms for potential scam activity, then enter conversations under a fabricated identity to surface scammers' details.

The named customer list includes Commonwealth Bank of Australia and TPG Telecom, alongside other utilities, telcos and government agencies. The reported results:

• TPG Telecom has diverted nearly 590,000 calls to Apate's agents.
• Commonwealth Bank has seen a 76% drop in publicly reported scam losses.
• An unnamed Australian bank has used Apate's outbound agents to disrupt 22 scam campaigns.

Why are investors backing deception?

Investors are betting there is money in fooling scammers. 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 spend the latest round on product development and international expansion, including an office in London and a larger presence in the United States.

The company's name fits its method. "Apate is named after the Greek goddess of deception, which felt appropriate given what our agents do," Joffe said. The startup even features scammers swearing at its bots in its pitch material.

The swearing is a metric, not a liability. "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," Joffe said.

Scam-baiting has long existed as a hobby, with practitioners getting scammers to read entire books aloud or get ridiculous tattoos. Apate's bet is that large language models have turned that hobby into infrastructure: fake victims that never tire, never hang up, and report everything they hear. As AI-driven fraud losses climb toward a billion dollars a year in FBI complaints alone, banks and telcos appear willing to pay for the reverse channel.