Apate Sends AI Agents Undercover to Bait Scammers and Gather Fraud Intelligence

The agents pretend to be people of different ages, genders and accents, and speak various languages as they try to keep scammers engaged long enough to learn something useful. Apate says its fleet of agents has so far wasted 17 years of scammers’ time across 2.5 million conversations. For Apate’s customer base of banks, telecom companies, government agencies and utilities, the undercover agents try to get scammers to reveal things usually learned only after a victim has been scammed: bank accounts, crypto wallets, phone numbers, malicious websites, the brands they are impersonating and other details about the scams they are running. Apate then feeds that information to its customers, who use it to inform their anti-fraud measures and initiatives. Apate will pitch a panel of venture capital judges at Disrupt, which is taking place this week at Moscone West in San Francisco through Thursday, October 15.

TechCrunch AI reported that the FBI received more than 22,000 complaints of AI-related crimes in 2025, resulting in about $893 million in losses. More than $632 million of that came from investment scams, in which the FBI says fraudsters use AI to run conversations and deepfake the voices and appearances of celebrities, executives and trusted figures. For a long time, people made a hobby of deliberately stringing scammers along, sometimes getting scammers to read entire books aloud or even get ridiculous tattoos. With AI growing more capable, the tables are turning.

Apate’s idea was sparked by a real scam call. 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 decided to play dumb for the benefit of his kids and kept 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, and 44 minutes of his own wasted time. He wondered whether he could automate it and learn something useful in the process. That idea led to research at Macquarie University, where Kaafar and 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, but by then the scammer has already reached the customer. We go to the scammer directly and get the information before anyone gets hurt,” Brad Joffe, co-founder and chief commercial officer, 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 Apate uses both frontier models and its own fine-tuned models to power its agents and analysis. The company trains its models on conversations its agents have had with scammers, as well as the research Kaafar did at Macquarie. 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 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.

Apate’s customers include Commonwealth Bank of Australia, TPG Telecom, and 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. Apate raised $8.15 million in seed funding in August from Lobby Capital, OIF Ventures, Investible, Concept Ventures and Baobab Ventures. Joffe said the company has 20 employees.