An AI company that celebrates when people swear at its product is either doing something very wrong or something very right. In Apate’s case, it’s the latter. The Australian startup doesn’t use AI agents to write code or summarize meetings. It sends them into the wild to get scammed on purpose.
Founded in 2024 and rooted in research from Macquarie University in Sydney, Apate deploys thousands of AI agents that pose as ordinary people across calls, messages, emails, and social platforms. These agents answer scam calls, follow phishing links, join suspicious investment groups, and keep fraudsters talking as long as possible. They come with different ages, genders, accents, and languages, all designed to look like easy targets. According to TechCrunch, the company says its agents have so far wasted 17 years of scammers’ time across 2.5 million conversations.
But the wasted time is almost a side benefit. The real product is what the agents extract during those conversations: bank accounts, crypto wallets, phone numbers, malicious websites, impersonated brands, and operational details about ongoing scams. That intelligence gets packaged and sold to Apate’s customers, which include banks, telecom companies, government agencies, and utilities. Commonwealth Bank of Australia reported a 76% drop in publicly reported scam losses. TPG Telecom has diverted nearly 590,000 calls to Apate’s agents. An unnamed Australian bank used the platform to disrupt 22 separate scam campaigns.
The company’s co-founder and chief commercial officer Brad Joffe put it plainly: “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.”
This approach matters because the threat has grown significantly more sophisticated. The FBI received over 22,000 complaints of AI-related crimes in 2025, resulting in roughly $893 million in losses. More than $632 million of that came from investment scams, where fraudsters use AI to run conversations and deepfake the voices of executives and celebrities. The fraud industry has automated itself. Apate’s answer is to automate the counter-attack.
The idea came from a real call. Years ago, Apate’s founder and CEO Dali Kaafar was at a family picnic when he recognized a scammer on the line. He played along for 44 minutes. Everyone laughed, but Kaafar noticed something: that was 44 minutes the scammer spent not calling a real victim. He started wondering whether that experience could scale. That question eventually drove research at Macquarie using machine learning and NLP to analyze scam calls, and later became the company itself.
Apate uses both frontier models and its own fine-tuned models trained on real scammer conversations. Customers also get access to an analytics portal where they can track threats targeting their brands, products, and users. They can even assign agents specific missions, like extracting a crypto wallet address from an active fraudster.
Investors are paying attention. Apate raised $8.15 million in seed funding in August from Lobby Capital, OIF Ventures, Investible, Concept Ventures, and Baobab Ventures, bringing total funding to just under $10 million. The company plans to open a London office and expand into the U.S. market. It’s also a finalist in this year’s Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt.
The name comes from the Greek goddess of deception. Joffe says the team actively tracks how often scammers swear at the bots, and treats every insult as a small victory. That’s a reasonable metric. Frustration means the agents are working.
