Apate sends AI agents undercover to bait scammers for intel

Founded in 2024 out of research at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australian startup Apate.ai deploys thousands of AI agents that pose as unsuspecting victims — answering scam calls, replying to shady texts and emails, following phishing links, and joining social-media groups to bait fraudsters. The agents vary in age, gender, and accent and speak multiple languages as they try to keep scammers engaged long enough to learn something useful.

The company says its fleet has wasted 17 years of scammers’ time across 2.5 million conversations. More importantly for its customer base of banks, telecom companies, government agencies, and utilities, the agents try to get scammers to reveal bank accounts, crypto wallets, phone numbers, malicious websites, the brands they’re impersonating, and other details usually learned only after a real victim has already been scammed — intelligence Apate then feeds to customers for their anti-fraud measures. The need is growing: 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 it from investment scams in which fraudsters used AI to run conversations and deepfake the voices of celebrities, executives, and trusted figures.

The idea traces to a real scam call: founder and CEO Dali Kaafar strung one along for 44 minutes at a family picnic to amuse his kids, then realized those were 44 minutes the scammer hadn’t spent on a real victim — which led to research at Macquarie, where he and colleagues used machine learning and natural-language processing to analyze scam calls and improve detection. “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,” co-founder and chief commercial officer Brad Joffe told TechCrunch. Joffe said Apate uses both frontier models and its own fine-tuned models, trained on agent-scammer conversations and Kaafar’s research.

Customers get an insights portal and can assign agents specific missions, such as obtaining a bank account number or crypto-wallet address. Apate’s customers include Commonwealth Bank of Australia and TPG Telecom; Joffe said TPG has diverted nearly 590,000 calls to Apate’s agents, Commonwealth has seen a 76% drop in publicly reported scam losses, and an unnamed Australian bank has used outbound agents to disrupt 22 scam campaigns. Apate, a finalist in this year’s Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt, raised $8.15 million in seed funding in August from Lobby Capital, OIF Ventures, Investible, Concept Ventures, and Baobab Ventures. The 20-person company has raised just under $10 million in total and plans to spend it on product and international expansion, including a London office and a larger U.S. presence.

Why it matters

By turning the time scammers spend chasing bots into usable intelligence, Apate’s model gets ahead of fraud before a real customer is targeted — a preventive approach that contrasts with the after-the-fact blocking most of the industry still relies on.