Apate Sends AI Agents Undercover to Bait Scammers and Harvest Fraud Data
Australian startup Apate.ai, founded in 2024 on research from Macquarie University in Sydney, runs thousands of AI agents that pose as ordinary victims: they answer scam calls, reply to phishing messages, and join investment groups to keep fraudsters talking. The company says the fleet has burned 17 years of scammers’ time across 2.5 million conversations, and the point is the intelligence that comes out of them.
The agents extract details normally learned only after someone has already been robbed: bank accounts, crypto wallets, phone numbers, malicious sites, and the brands a scammer is impersonating. That output goes to Apate’s customers, which include Commonwealth Bank of Australia and TPG Telecom; TPG has diverted nearly 590,000 calls to the agents, and Commonwealth reports a 76% drop in publicly reported scam losses.
Apate raised $8.15 million in seed funding in August, bringing its total to just under $10 million, and plans a London office plus a larger US presence. The pitch lands in a market the FBI describes as growing: it logged over 22,000 AI-related crime complaints in 2025 with roughly $893 million in losses, two thirds of it from investment scams.
Related: DeepMind and Singapore’s GovTech Build On-Device Gemma Scam Detector