Most anti-scam tools try to keep scammers away from people. Australian startup Apate.ai does the opposite: it sends AI agents to be "scammed" on purpose. The agents pose as potential victims of different ages, genders, accents and languages, including elderly people who seem easy to fool. They answer scam calls, reply to messages and emails, follow phishing links and join scammers' chat groups, then play along, acting confused, chatting and stalling.
While the scammer is busy, the agent quietly collects what the criminal reveals: bank account numbers, crypto wallet addresses, phone numbers, fake websites and the brands being impersonated. Apate passes this intelligence to customers, mainly banks, telecoms and government agencies, through an insights portal so the accounts and sites can be blocked or taken down.
The company reports more than 2.5 million conversations, adding up to about 17 years of scammers' time, with some conversations lasting up to two hours. TPG Telecom has diverted nearly 590,000 calls to the agents, and Commonwealth Bank of Australia has reported a 76% drop in publicly reported scam losses. The founder has put the number of AI bots at about 350,000, according to coverage citing WIRED; TechCrunch describes "thousands" of agents.
The idea started with one call. During a family picnic, founder Dali Kaafar, a cybersecurity researcher at Macquarie University in Sydney, played along with a scammer for 44 minutes to amuse his kids, and realised that every minute the scammer spent on him was a minute not spent on someone more vulnerable. Apate launched in 2024 and announced an $8.15 million seed round in August 2026, led by Lobby Capital with OIF Ventures, Investible, Concept Ventures and Baobab Ventures. The money goes to product development and growth in the US and Europe, including a London office planned for next quarter. All figures above are company-reported and have not been independently verified.
Sources: TechCrunch · Fintech Global · Apate.ai