Apate.ai is an Australian startup founded in 2024 on research from Macquarie University in Sydney. The company deploys thousands of AI agents that pose as victims to engage scammers over calls, messages, email and social platforms, with the goal of collecting actionable intelligence about fraud operations.
What the agents do
Apate’s agents answer scam calls, reply to suspicious messages and emails, follow phishing links and join online groups where scams are run. The agents impersonate people of various ages, genders, accents and languages to keep scammers talking long enough to gather useful data. Apate says its fleet has logged 2.5 million conversations so far, which it estimates wasted 17 years of scammers’ time.
Why the intelligence matters
Rather than reacting after a fraud has already happened, Apate seeks to directly extract information from perpetrators: bank account numbers, crypto wallet addresses, phone numbers, malicious websites, the brands being impersonated, and other operational details. That intelligence is delivered to customers so they can strengthen prevention, blocking and investigative measures before more victims are harmed.
Customers and impact
Clients include Commonwealth Bank of Australia, TPG Telecom and other utilities, telcos and government agencies. Apate says TPG has diverted nearly 590,000 calls to its agents; Commonwealth Bank reported a 76% drop in publicly reported scam losses; and an unnamed Australian bank used Apate’s outbound agents to disrupt 22 scam campaigns. Customers also get access to an insights portal with analytics on scams targeting their users, employees, brands and products, and can assign specific missions to agents, such as obtaining an account number or crypto address.
Technology and origins
Apate uses a mix of frontier models and its own fine-tuned models to run agents and analyze conversations. Model training draws on the agents’ real interactions with scammers and on research conducted by the company’s founder, Dali Kaafar, at Macquarie University.
Kaafar’s inspiration came from a real scam call: at a family picnic he deliberately kept a scammer on the line for 44 minutes so his children could listen and laugh. He realised those 44 minutes were time the scammer did not spend targeting real victims — and wondered if it could be automated and used to learn about scammers’ methods.
Context: AI-enabled fraud
Apate’s approach comes as AI also enables more convincing scams. According to the FBI, in 2025 it received more than 22,000 complaints tied to AI-related crimes, resulting in about $893 million in losses; over $632 million of those losses were from investment scams that used AI to run conversations and produce deepfakes of voices and appearances.
Funding and expansion plans
Apate raised $8.15 million in seed funding in August from Lobby Capital, OIF Ventures, Investible, Concept Ventures and Baobab Ventures. The roughly 20-person company has raised just under $10 million in total. The latest funding will be used for product development and international expansion, including opening an office in London and expanding its presence in the United States.
Company culture and communications
Brad Joffe, co-founder and chief commercial officer, told TechCrunch that much of the industry reacts after the fact and that Apate’s value is going to the scammer directly to obtain information before harm occurs. The company’s name references Apate, the Greek goddess of deception; Joffe said pitch materials even include recordings of scammers swearing at the bots, which Apate counts as a sign of frustration and celebrates internally.
Conclusion
Apate.ai’s model represents a shift from reactive to proactive intelligence-gathering in fraud prevention, using automated conversational agents to waste scammers’ time while collecting details that can prevent or mitigate losses. The approach raises questions about deceptive identity use and surveillance, but for banks, telcos and government customers it provides concrete, operational data to disrupt scam campaigns.
