Apate's AI Agents Waste Scammers' Time — and Sell What They Learn

Australian startup Apate.ai says its fleet of AI agents has wasted 17 years of scammers' time across 2.5 million conversations — and turned every minute of it into sellable fraud intelligence.

Founded in 2024 on research from Macquarie University in Sydney, Apate deploys thousands of AI agents that pose as easy victims. They answer scam calls, reply to shady messages and emails, click phishing links and join social media groups to bait fraudsters. The agents play people of all ages, genders and accents, and speak multiple languages to keep scammers talking long enough to give something away.

That something is the core product. Apate's agents extract details usually learned only after a real victim has been scammed: bank accounts, crypto wallets, phone numbers, malicious websites and the brands fraudsters impersonate. The startup feeds that intelligence to banks, telecom companies, government agencies and utilities.

Apate is a finalist at this year's Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt, running at Moscone West in San Francisco through Thursday, October 15.

Why banks are buying this

The backdrop is AI-powered fraud at industrial scale. The FBI received more than 22,000 complaints of AI-related crimes in 2025, driving roughly $893 million in losses. More than $632 million of that came from investment scams, where the FBI says fraudsters use AI to run conversations and deepfake the voices and faces of celebrities and executives.

"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.

"Our AI agents talk to tens of thousands of scammers every day across calls, messages, email and the web. What we offer our customers is what comes out of those conversations, and what they can do with it," Joffe said.

What do customers actually get?

Beyond access to the agent fleet, customers use an insights portal with intelligence and analytics on scams targeting their end users, employees, brands and products. They can also assign agents specific missions — obtaining a bank account number or a crypto-wallet address, for example.

Apate's text agents search forums, investment groups and social platforms for potential scam activity, then enter conversations under fabricated identities to surface scammers' details.

The results, per Joffe:

• TPG Telecom has diverted nearly 590,000 calls to Apate's agents.
• Commonwealth Bank of Australia has seen a 76% drop in publicly reported scam losses.
• An unnamed Australian bank used outbound agents to disrupt 22 scam campaigns.

Customers also include other utilities, telcos and government agencies.

A 44-minute scam call started it

The idea came from a real phone call. Several years ago, founder and CEO Dali Kaafar was at a family picnic when an unknown number rang. He realized it was a scammer and played dumb for his kids, keeping the caller on the line for 44 minutes.

Everyone laughed. But Kaafar noticed those were 44 minutes the scammer hadn't spent calling a real victim — and 44 minutes of Kaafar's own wasted time. Could he automate it and learn something useful?

The question became research at Macquarie University, where Kaafar and colleagues used machine learning and natural language processing to uncover scam call content and build better detection methods. Apate now trains its models — a mix of frontier models and its own fine-tuned ones — on those conversations plus its agents' live exchanges with scammers.

Where the $8.15 million goes

Investors are betting on fooling fraudsters. 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. It plans to spend the round on product development and international expansion, including a London office and a larger U.S. presence.

The name fits the method. "Apate is named after the Greek goddess of deception, which felt appropriate given what our agents do," Joffe said. The startup even features scammers swearing at its bots in 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," he said.

With scam losses climbing and AI making fraud cheaper to run, banks and telcos now have a supplier that attacks the problem before the money moves — and Apate has $8.15 million to scale that playbook beyond Australia.

By Amara Osei