Apate.ai deploys AI agents posing as victims to gather scam intelligence

Apate.ai, a Sydney startup spun out of Macquarie University research in 2024, runs thousands of AI agents that pretend to be easy targets for fraudsters. The company is a finalist in the Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt, held at Moscone West in San Francisco through October 15, 2026.

The agents pick up scam calls, reply to suspicious texts and emails, click on phishing links and join social media groups. They adopt varied ages, genders and accents and converse in several languages, all to keep fraudsters talking long enough to reveal something useful. Apate says its agents have consumed 17 years of scammers' time across 2.5 million conversations.

Getting ahead of the victim

The goal is to surface details that usually emerge only after someone has lost money: bank accounts, crypto wallet addresses, phone numbers, malicious websites and the brands being impersonated. That intelligence goes to customers including banks, telecom operators, government agencies and utilities. Clients also get an analytics portal and can task agents with specific missions, such as obtaining a particular account number or wallet address.

Co-founder and chief commercial officer Brad Joffe argued that most of the industry reacts too late, while Apate takes a different route: "We go to the scammer directly and get the information before anyone gets hurt." He said the company combines frontier models with its own fine-tuned models, trained on agent conversations with scammers and on academic work.

The concept began with a real scam call. Founder and CEO Dali Kaafar, at a family picnic, played along with a fraudster for 44 minutes to amuse his children, then realised that was time the caller had not spent on a genuine victim. He went on to study scam calls at Macquarie using machine learning and natural language processing.

Customers, results and funding

Customers include Commonwealth Bank of Australia and TPG Telecom. According to Joffe, TPG has routed close to 590,000 calls to Apate's agents, Commonwealth has recorded a 76% fall in publicly reported scam losses, and an unnamed Australian bank has disrupted 22 scam campaigns using its outbound agents. The 20-person company raised an $8.15 million seed round in August 2026 from Lobby Capital, OIF Ventures, Investible, Concept Ventures and Baobab Ventures, bringing total funding to just under $10 million. It plans to invest in its product, open a London office and expand in the U.S.

The pitch lands as AI makes fraud more potent. The FBI logged more than 22,000 complaints about AI-related crimes in 2025, tied to roughly $893 million in losses, over $632 million of which came from investment scams that the bureau says rely on AI-driven conversations and deepfaked voices and faces.