Apate Deploys AI Agents Undercover to Waste Scammers' Time and Gather Fraud Intelligence

AI Agents Go Undercover as Fake Victims

Apate.ai, an Australian startup founded in 2024 on the basis of research at Macquarie University in Sydney, deploys thousands of AI agents that masquerade as innocent victims to engage scammers across phone calls, text messages, email, and the web. The agents answer scam calls, respond to suspicious messages, follow phishing links, and join social media groups and investment forums. They adopt fabricated identities with different ages, genders, and accents and speak multiple languages, aiming to keep fraudsters talking long enough to extract useful intelligence.

Wasting Scammer Time While Collecting Evidence

The company says its fleet of agents has so far wasted 17 years of scammers' time across 2.5 million conversations. More important for its customers, the agents try to coax out details usually learned only after a real victim has been scammed: bank accounts, crypto wallet addresses, phone numbers, malicious websites, and the brands being impersonated. Customers can assign specific missions, such as obtaining a bank account number or a crypto wallet address, and receive intelligence and analytics through an insights portal covering scams targeting their end users, employees, brands, and products.

From a Family Picnic to Macquarie Research

The idea originated when founder and CEO Dali Kaafar received a scam call during a family picnic and played dumb for 44 minutes to entertain his children, keeping the scammer from calling a real victim. That experience led to research at Macquarie University, where Kaafar and colleagues used machine learning and natural language processing to uncover the content of scam calls and develop better detection methods. Co-founder and chief commercial officer Brad Joffe said the company combines frontier models with its own fine-tuned models trained on agent conversations and that research. "Most of the industry works after the fact," Joffe said. "We go to the scammer directly and get the information before anyone gets hurt."

Customers, Results, and Expansion Plans

Customers include Commonwealth Bank of Australia and TPG Telecom, along with other utilities, telcos, and government agencies. TPG has diverted nearly 590,000 calls to Apate's agents, Commonwealth Bank has seen a 76% drop in publicly reported scam losses, and an unnamed Australian bank has used the outbound agents to disrupt 22 scam campaigns. The 20-person company raised $8.15 million in seed funding in August from Lobby Capital, OIF Ventures, Investible, Concept Ventures, and Baobab Ventures, bringing its total to just under $10 million. Apate plans to spend the round on product development and international expansion, including opening an office in London and building a larger presence in the United States.

Sources: TechCrunch