Most companies use AI agents to ship products faster or to speed up workflows. Apate.ai sends them undercover to get scammed.

Founded in 2024 on the basis of research done in Macquarie University in Sydney, the Australian startup deploys thousands of AI agents that masquerade as innocent victims. The agents can answer scam calls, respond to shady messages and emails, follow phishing links, and join social media groups to bait fraudsters. They pretend to be people of all stripes, sporting different ages, genders and accents, and speak various languages as they try to keep scammers engaged long enough to learn something useful.

The company says its fleet of agents has so far wasted 17 years of scammers’ time across 2.5 million conversations. More importantly for Apate’s customer base of banks, telecom companies, government agencies and utilities, the undercover agents try to get scammers to reveal things about themselves that are usually learned only a victim has been scammed: bank accounts, crypto wallets, phone numbers, malicious websites, the brands they’re impersonating, and other details about the scams they’re running.

For a long time, people have made a hobby out of deliberately stringing scammers along — sometimes hilariously, like getting scammers to read aloud entire books, or even to get ridiculous tattoos. Now, with AI growing increasingly capable, the tables are turning.

Curiously, the idea behind Apate was sparked by a real scam call.

Several years ago, Apate’s founder and CEO Dali Kaafar was at a family picnic when he got a call from an unknown number. Realizing it was a scammer on the line, he decided to play dumb for the benefit of his kids and managed to keep the call going for 44 minutes.

Everyone had a laugh, but Kaafar noticed that those were 44 minutes the scammer had not spent calling a real victim. It was also 44 minutes of his wasted time, which led him to wonder: Could he automate it, and in the process, learn something useful?

That idea eventually led to research work at his job at Macquarie University, where Kaafar and his colleagues used machine learning and natural language processing to uncover the content of scam calls, and develop better ways to detect and prevent scams.

In addition to access to Apate’s fleet of agents, customers get access to an insights portal that offers intelligence and analytics on scams targeting their end users or employees, brands, products, and more. Customers can even assign these agents particular missions, such as obtaining a bank account number or crypto-wallet address. Its text agents can search forums, investment groups and social platforms for potential scam activity, and can then enter conversations with a fabricated identity to surface scammers’ details.

The startup’s customers include Commonwealth Bank of Australia, TPG Telecom, as well as other utilities, telcos and government agencies. 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 the startup works with has used its outbound agents to disrupt 22 scam campaigns.

Investors are betting there is money to be made from fooling scammers, too. 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 its product and international expansion, including opening an office in London and building a larger presence in the U.S.

“Apate is named after the Greek goddess of deception, which felt appropriate given what our agents do,” Joffe said, adding that the startup even features scammers swearing at the bots in its pitch material.

“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.”