Apate Deploys Undercover AI Agents to Get Scammed and Gather Fraud Intelligence

Most companies use AI agents to ship products faster or speed up workflows. Apate.ai sends them undercover to get scammed.

TechCrunch reported on October 14 that the Australian startup, founded in 2024 on research done at Macquarie University in Sydney, deploys thousands of AI agents that masquerade as innocent victims. They can answer scam calls, respond to shady messages and emails, follow phishing links, and join social media groups to bait fraudsters.

The agents pretend to be people of all stripes—different ages, genders and accents—and speak various languages to keep scammers engaged long enough to learn something useful. Apate says its fleet has so far wasted 17 years of scammers' time across 2.5 million conversations.

For its customers—banks, telecom companies, government agencies and utilities—the real value is what the agents extract from scammers: bank accounts, crypto wallets, phone numbers, malicious websites, the brands being impersonated, and details of the scams in progress.

The idea was sparked by a real scam call. Apate founder and CEO Dali Kaafar was at a family picnic when a scammer rang; he played dumb for his kids and kept the call going for 44 minutes, realizing those were 44 minutes the scammer was not calling a real victim. That led to research at Macquarie University using machine learning and natural language processing to understand scam calls.

Apate co-founder and chief commercial officer Brad Joffe told TechCrunch that most of the industry works after the fact: telcos block numbers but scammers get new ones, and banks watch transactions after the money has moved. Apate's approach is to go to the scammer directly and get the information before anyone gets hurt. He said the agents talk to tens of thousands of scammers every day across calls, messages, email and the web, drawing on both frontier models and Apate's own fine-tuned models trained on those conversations.

The context is stark: the FBI received more than 22,000 complaints of AI-related crimes in 2025, resulting in about $893 million in losses, with more than $632 million from investment scams. Apate is one of the finalists at this year's Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt. What to watch is whether agent-versus-agent counter-fraud can scale, and how customers and regulators will scrutinize the boundaries, compliance and privacy of intelligence gathered this way.