Apate sends AI agents undercover to get scammed so they can gather fraud intelligence

Apate.ai, a 2024 Australian startup spun out of Macquarie University research, deploys thousands of AI agents that impersonate scam victims across phone calls, messages, emails, phishing links, and social media groups. The agents, which mimic varied ages, genders, accents, and languages, keep scammers engaged to extract details usually only discovered after a victim is defrauded, such as bank accounts, crypto wallets, phone numbers, malicious websites, and impersonated brands. Apate says its agents have wasted 17 years of scammers' time across 2.5 million conversations. The company feeds the harvested intelligence to customers including banks, telecom companies, government agencies, and utilities; Commonwealth Bank of Australia reports a 76% drop in publicly reported scam losses after diverting calls to Apate, and TPG Telecom has routed nearly 590,000 calls to its agents. The idea originated when founder and CEO Dali Kaafar kept a real scam call going for 44 minutes at a family picnic and realized that time represented a scammer's wasted effort that could be automated for intelligence gathering. Apate uses frontier and fine-tuned models, offers an insights portal with optional mission-specific agents, has raised $8.15 million in seed funding (just under $10 million total) from investors including Lobby Capital, OIF Ventures, Investible, Concept Ventures, and Baobab Ventures, and plans product and international expansion with a London office and a larger U.S. presence.

(Source：TechCrunch)