Most companies are using AI agents to build products faster or speed up internal work. Apate.ai is using them to waste scammers' time.
The startup, founded in 2024 on research done at Macquarie University in Sydney, runs thousands of AI agents that masquerade as innocent victims. The agents answer scam calls, reply to suspicious messages and emails, follow phishing links and join social media groups to bait fraudsters. They present as people of different ages, genders and accents, and they speak several languages. Their goal is to keep scammers engaged long enough to learn something useful.
The company says its fleet has wasted 17 years of scammers' time across 2.5 million conversations. The time is a side benefit. The real product is what the agents extract. Apate's customers, which include banks, telecom companies, government agencies and utilities, want the details that usually surface only after a victim has already lost money. The agents try to get scammers to reveal bank accounts, crypto wallets, phone numbers, malicious websites, the brands being impersonated and other details about how the scams operate.
Apate, one of the finalists at this year's Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt, feeds that information to its customers, who use it to shape their anti-fraud measures. The company will pitch a panel of venture capital judges at the event, which runs through Thursday, October 15, at Moscone West in San Francisco.
The timing reflects a wider problem. The FBI received more than 22,000 complaints about 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 other trusted figures.
People have long amused themselves by stringing scammers along. Some have gotten scammers to read entire books aloud or to get ridiculous tattoos. Apate takes that impulse and turns it into a business.
The idea grew out of a real scam call. Several years ago, Apate founder and CEO Dali Kaafar was at a family picnic when an unknown number rang his phone. He recognized a scammer, pretended not to understand what was happening for the benefit of his kids, and kept the caller on the line for 44 minutes.
Everyone laughed. Kaafar, though, realized those were 44 minutes the scammer had not spent calling a real victim. They were also 44 minutes of his own time, and that led him to ask whether the process could be automated and whether it could produce something useful along the way.
That question led to research at Macquarie University, where Kaafar and his colleagues used machine learning and natural language processing to analyze the content of scam calls and build better ways to detect and prevent them.
Brad Joffe, Apate's co-founder and chief commercial officer, argues that the industry is reacting too late. “Most of the industry works after the fact,” Joffe told TechCrunch. “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.”
He said the agents are constantly active. “Our AI agents talk to tens of thousands of scammers every day across calls, messages, email, and the web,” he said. “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 run the agents and analyze the results. The company trains its models on conversations its agents have had with scammers, along with Kaafar's research at Macquarie.
Customers get access to the agent fleet and to an insights portal that tracks scams aimed at their end users, employees, brands and products. They can also assign the agents specific missions, such as obtaining a bank account number or a crypto wallet address. Text agents can search forums, investment groups and social platforms for potential scam activity, then enter conversations under a fabricated identity to uncover the people behind it.
Customers include Commonwealth Bank of Australia and TPG Telecom, along with other utilities, telecom companies and government agencies. Joffe said TPG has diverted nearly 590,000 calls to Apate's agents. He said Commonwealth has seen a 76% drop in publicly reported scam losses. An unnamed Australian bank working with the startup has used its outbound agents to disrupt 22 scam campaigns.
Investors are also betting on the model. 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 use the latest round for product development and international expansion, including an office in London and a larger presence in the United States.
The name comes from mythology. “Apate is named after the Greek goddess of deception, which felt appropriate given what our agents do,” Joffe said. He added that the company's pitch materials even include scammers swearing at the bots.
“We track that as a sign of frustration and every swear word gets celebrated by us at Apate,” he said. “We are probably one of the only businesses in the world that celebrates when people swear at our product.”
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