Apate Deploys AI Agents Undercover to Bait Scammers and Gather

Most companies deploy AI agents to accelerate product development or streamline workflows. Apate.ai sends them undercover—to get scammed. Founded in 2024 on research conducted at Macquarie University in Sydney, the Australian startup operates thousands of AI agents that pose as innocent victims. These agents answer scam calls, reply to suspicious messages and emails, click phishing links, and infiltrate social media groups to bait fraudsters. They assume a wide range of personas—varying in age, gender, accent, and language—engaging scammers long enough to extract actionable intelligence. The company reports that its fleet of agents has collectively wasted 17 years of scammers' time across 2.5 million conversations. More critically for Apate's customers—which include banks, telecom companies, government agencies, and utilities—these undercover agents coax scammers into revealing information typically discovered only after a victim has been defrauded: bank account numbers, crypto wallet addresses, phone numbers, malicious websites, impersonated brands, and other operational details of ongoing scams. Apate, a finalist in this year's Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt, then relays that intelligence to its clients, who use it to strengthen their anti-fraud measures and initiatives. The company will pitch a panel of venture capital judges at Disrupt, held at Moscone West in San Francisco through Thursday, October 15. This represents a curious evolution of scam-baiting—but not a surprising one, given how much AI has empowered scammers and hackers. The FBI received over 22,000 complaints of AI-related crimes in 2025, resulting in approximately $893 million in losses. More than $632 million of that stemmed from investment scams, in which the FBI says fraudsters use AI to conduct conversations and create deepfakes of celebrities, executives, and trusted figures. For years, people have made a hobby of deliberately stringing scammers along—sometimes hilariously, such as convincing scammers to read entire books aloud or even get ridiculous tattoos. Now, as AI grows increasingly capable, the tables are turning. Curiously, the idea behind Apate was sparked by a real scam call. Several years ago, Apate founder and CEO Dali Kaafar was at a family picnic when he received a call from an unknown number. Realizing it was a scammer, he decided to play dumb for his kids' amusement and managed to keep the call going for 44 minutes. Everyone had a laugh, but Kaafar noticed those were 44 minutes the scammer had not spent calling a real victim. It was also 44 minutes of his own wasted time—which led him to wonder: Could he automate the process and, in doing so, learn something useful? That idea eventually led to research 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. "Most of the industry works after the fact. Telcos block numbers, but scammers just get new ones. Banks watch transactions..."

via TechCrunch Startups