Apate's fake victims have kept fraudsters busy for a combined 17 years, and the Australian startup is now bringing its scam-baiting bots to the US and UK.
An Australian startup called Apate is fighting scammers with their own weapon: AI. Its roughly 350,000 bots pose as possible victims, answering scam calls, texts and chat messages and stringing fraudsters along for as long as two hours at a time.
The bots never hand over money. Instead they draw out useful clues, like the bank accounts scammers use to move cash, crypto wallets and fake websites, and pass them to banks and phone companies so they can block the scam faster. Apate says its bots have now held 2.5 million conversations and wasted 17 years of scammers' time.
Until your bank uses tools like this, stay careful: hang up on pressure and call back on a number you trust.
Somewhere right now, a scammer is spending a long afternoon trying to talk an AI out of its savings. Australian startup Apate has built an army of roughly 350,000 bots that pose as easy targets, and the company says they have already eaten up a combined 17 years of fraudsters’ time.
Why should you care? Every minute a scammer wastes on a fake victim is a minute they aren’t calling your parents, your neighbor or you. The losses are huge: the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center logged more than 1 million complaints in 2025 and nearly $20.9 billion lost to cybercrime, up 26% from 2024. The Federal Trade Commission put consumer fraud losses at $15.9 billion that year. And Apate is now bringing its AI anti-scam tools to North America.
The bots pretend to be real people who might fall for a scam, then never quite do. When a bank or phone company sends a suspected scam call their way, an AI persona picks up and plays along: interested, a little doubtful, always one more question away from handing over money.
Each bot has its own personality, voice, language skills and backstory, so scammers don’t realize they’re talking to software. Some have WhatsApp and some don’t. Some answer, and some cut the call short with a promise to ring back later, just as a real person might. Apate’s founder and CEO, Dali Kaafar, says calls regularly run past two hours.
Calls are only part of it. The bots also reply to scam texts and emails, follow phishing links (fake login pages built to steal passwords) and slip into scam chat groups on social media. When a security newsletter team tested a demo, playing scammers pitching a crypto investment, the bot stayed skeptical but chatty, and six minutes of hard selling got them nowhere.
Wasting time is only half the job. The other half is gathering evidence while the scammer thinks they’re making progress. The bots steer conversations toward the details fraud fighters need: the bank account a victim would be told to pay into, cryptocurrency wallet addresses, links to fake websites and the companies or agencies being impersonated.
Apate says it has run more than 2.5 million of these conversations and collected over 250,000 pieces of intelligence. That includes money mule accounts, which are bank accounts criminals use to move stolen cash. Customers can even point the bots at a specific goal, such as getting a scammer to reveal payment details.
The company’s pitch is that most defenses act too late. Phone companies block a number and the scammer simply gets a new one. Banks spot a suspicious payment only after the criminal has already reached the customer. Apate’s co-founder Brad Joffe argues the smarter move is to go straight to the scammer and get the information before anyone is hurt.
The startup grew out of research at Macquarie University in Sydney and was founded in 2024. Its story starts with a scam call Kaafar got during a family picnic. He kept the caller on the line for 44 minutes, amusing his kids and keeping the scammer away from real victims, and wondered whether software could do the same thing at scale.
Its customers include Commonwealth Bank of Australia and the phone company TPG Telecom, which has diverted nearly 590,000 calls to the bots. In August, Apate raised $8.15 million in a round led by Lobby Capital. Co-founder Peter Eckermann is moving to the US to lead the North American push, and a London office is planned, so readers in the US, UK and Canada may soon be protected by these bots without ever knowing it. The research team stays in Sydney.
Scammers do notice, sometimes. Joffe says the team cheers when a frustrated fraudster starts swearing at a bot, because it means the trap is working.
You won’t install Apate on your phone. It works behind the scenes for banks, phone networks and government agencies. If your bank or carrier signs up, the benefit shows up as fewer scam calls reaching you and faster warnings when a new scam starts spreading, because the intelligence arrives while the scam is still running.
It won’t stop scams on its own. Criminals send billions of calls and messages a year, and some run industrial-scale scam compounds. Your own habits still matter most:
The same trick is spreading in cybersecurity. Researchers at ETH Zurich found that honeypots, decoy computer systems built to lure hackers, kept AI-powered attackers busy much longer when a language model made them behave more like real machines.
It can slow them down and expose them. Apate’s bots tie up scammers for hours and collect the account numbers and websites that banks and phone companies use to block fraud.
Not for individuals. Apate sells to banks, telecoms and agencies, and it is now expanding into the US with a co-founder leading that effort.
No. They are designed to sound interested but never actually pay, which keeps scammers hoping while the bot gathers information.
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