Australia's Apate Sends Thousands of AI Agents Undercover to Fight Scammers

What happened

Per TechCrunch on October 14, Australian startup Apate deploys thousands of AI agents that masquerade as victims — answering scam calls, responding to shady messages and emails, following phishing links, and joining social media groups — to extract fraud intelligence such as bank accounts, crypto wallets, phone numbers, and malicious websites, feeding it back into banks' and telecoms' anti-fraud efforts.

Apate was founded in 2024 on the basis of research done at Macquarie University in Sydney; its founder and CEO is Dali Kaafar and co-founder and chief commercial officer is Brad Joffe. Where scam-baiters once strung scammers along by hand for fun, Apate automates and industrializes it: agents pose as people of different ages, genders, accents, and languages, keeping scammers engaged long enough to learn something useful.

The company says its fleet of agents has so far held 2.5 million conversations, wasting 17 years of scammers' time. Its customers include banks, telecom companies, government agencies, and utilities: TPG Telecom has diverted nearly 590,000 calls to the agents; the Commonwealth Bank of Australia publicly reported a 76% drop in scam losses; and an unnamed Australian bank used its outbound agents to disrupt 22 scam campaigns.

Most of the industry works after the fact. 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.

— Brad Joffe, co-founder and chief commercial officer of Apate

Key facts

1. $8.15M seed round in August: investors include Lobby Capital, OIF Ventures, Investible, Concept Ventures, and Baobab Ventures; the 20-person company has raised just under $10 million in total and plans a London office and a larger US presence.
2. Disrupt finalist: Apate is one of the finalists at Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, pitching VC judges this week at Moscone West in San Francisco (the event runs through October 15).
3. Frontier models plus in-house fine-tuning: Joffe said the agents run on both frontier models and the company's own fine-tuned models, trained on real conversations with scammers and Kaafar's Macquarie research.
4. FBI backdrop: the FBI received more than 22,000 complaints of AI-related crimes in 2025, with about $893 million in losses — over $632 million from investment scams, in which fraudsters use AI to run conversations and deepfake the voices and appearances of celebrities and executives.