Apate.ai, an Australian startup founded in 2024 on research from Macquarie University, has flipped the script on fraudsters. Instead of using AI to speed up business workflows, it deploys thousands of AI agents that pretend to be innocent victims. These agents answer scam calls, reply to shady messages, follow phishing links, and join social media groups, all while posing as people of different ages, genders, accents, and languages. The goal is to keep scammers engaged long enough to reveal bank accounts, crypto wallet addresses, phone numbers, malicious websites, and the brands they are impersonating.
The company says its fleet has so far wasted 17 years of scammers' time across 2.5 million conversations. That intelligence goes to customers such as Commonwealth Bank of Australia, TPG Telecom, and other banks, utilities, and government agencies. 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 used outbound agents to disrupt 22 scam campaigns. The context is stark: the FBI received more than 22,000 complaints of AI-related crimes in 2025, with losses around $893 million.
Apate raised $8.15 million in seed funding in August from investors including Lobby Capital and OIF Ventures, bringing total funding to just under $10 million. The 20-person company plans to open a London office and expand in the U.S. Co-founder Brad Joffe says the approach differs from traditional defenses: "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." The startup is named after the Greek goddess of deception, and Joffe notes that swearing from scammers is treated as a success metric. Apate is a finalist at TechCrunch Disrupt's Startup Battlefield 200 this week in San Francisco.