Apate.ai, an Australian startup founded in 2024 out of research at Macquarie University in Sydney, has built its business around the opposite of the usual AI-agent use case: instead of shipping products or speeding up workflows, its thousands of AI agents go undercover to get scammed. The agents masquerade as innocent victims with fabricated identities of varying ages, genders, accents, and languages. They answer scam calls, respond to shady messages and emails, follow phishing links, and join social media groups to keep fraudsters engaged long enough to extract useful intelligence.

The company says its fleet has so far wasted 17 years of scammers’ time across 2.5 million conversations. More importantly for its customers — banks, telecom companies, government agencies, and utilities — the undercover agents try to get scammers to reveal details that are normally learned only after a victim has been scammed: bank accounts, crypto wallets, phone numbers, malicious websites, the brands being impersonated, and other specifics of the scams being run. Apate feeds that information to customers, who use it to inform their anti-fraud measures. Apate was one of the finalists at this year’s Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt, pitching a panel of VC judges at Moscone West in San Francisco.

The approach is a direct response to how much AI has empowered scammers. The article cites FBI data: more than 22,000 complaints of AI-related crimes in 2025, resulting in about $893 million in losses, with more than $632 million of that coming from investment scams where fraudsters use AI to run conversations and deepfake the voices and appearances of celebrities, executives, and trusted figures. Scam-baiting has long been a hobby, with people deliberately stringing scammers along — sometimes hilariously, like getting scammers to read entire books aloud or get ridiculous tattoos. Apate is an industrialized, intelligence-collecting version of that.

The origin story: several years ago, founder and CEO Dali Kaafar was at a family picnic when he got a call from an unknown number. Realizing it was a scammer, he played dumb for the benefit of his kids and kept the call going for 44 minutes. The family laughed, but Kaafar noticed those were 44 minutes the scammer had not spent calling a real victim — and 44 minutes of his own wasted time — which led him to wonder whether the process could be automated and made useful. That led to research 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.

Brad Joffe, co-founder and chief commercial officer, described the positioning: “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.” He said Apate’s AI agents talk to tens of thousands of scammers every day across calls, messages, email, and the web, and what the company offers customers is what comes out of those conversations and what they can do with it.

Technically, Apate uses both frontier models and its own fine-tuned models to power its agents and analysis. The models are trained on conversations its agents have had with scammers, plus the research Kaafar did at Macquarie. Customers get access to the agent fleet and an insights portal offering intelligence and analytics on scams targeting their end users, employees, brands, and products. They can assign agents particular missions, such as obtaining a bank account number or crypto-wallet address. Text agents can search forums, investment groups, and social platforms for potential scam activity, then enter conversations with a fabricated identity to surface scammers’ details.

Reported customer results include TPG Telecom diverting nearly 590,000 calls to Apate’s agents, Commonwealth Bank of Australia seeing a 76% drop in publicly reported scam losses, and an unnamed Australian bank using outbound agents to disrupt 22 scam campaigns. Investors have also bought in: 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 total and plans to spend the latest round on product and international expansion, including opening a London office and building a larger U.S. presence.

The name comes from the Greek goddess of deception, which Joffe said felt appropriate given what the agents do. He added that the startup even features scammers swearing at its bots in pitch material, tracking swearing as a sign of frustration: “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.”