The Pulse
Apate Sends AI Agents to Keep Scammers Talking
Apate uses AI agents to engage scammers across calls, messages, email and social platforms, seeking intelligence that could help organizations respond to fraud. The startup says its agents have occupied scammers for 17 years across 2.5 mill
AI.info Team · Written with AI ·
Apate wants scam calls to keep going
Phone companies often try to stop scam calls by blocking the numbers. Apate wants to answer them instead, using AI agents that pose as potential victims and keep fraudsters engaged. The competing approaches reflect a practical trade-off: blocking may cut off a call, while a longer exchange can expose details about the scam operation.
Apate’s agents respond to calls, texts and emails, follow phishing links and enter social media groups. The aim is to draw out information that could help banks, telecom companies, government agencies and utilities adjust their fraud defenses.
“Apate is named after the Greek goddess of deception, which felt appropriate given what our agents do,” Brad Joffe, Apate’s co-founder and chief commercial officer, told TechCrunch.
From a 44-minute call to millions of conversations
Apate began with an incident its founder and CEO, Dali Kaafar, turned into a research question. During a family picnic, Kaafar recognized a scam call and played along for 44 minutes, long enough to keep the caller from contacting someone else during that time. The exchange also prompted him to consider whether the tactic could be automated and used to gather intelligence.
Founded in 2024 from research at Macquarie University in Sydney, the Australian startup now deploys thousands of agents. Apate says they have occupied scammers for 17 years in total across 2.5 million conversations. The agents adopt different ages, genders and accents, and speak multiple languages as they try to sustain conversations.
The agents collect details for fraud teams
Apate’s agents seek information such as bank account and crypto-wallet details, phone numbers, malicious websites and the brands scammers impersonate. Customers can assign specific missions, including trying to obtain a bank account number or wallet address. Apate also offers an insights portal with analytics on scams targeting customers, employees, brands and products.
Text-based agents can look for potential scams in forums, investment groups and social platforms before entering conversations under fabricated identities. Joffe told TechCrunch that the company uses both frontier models and its own fine-tuned models, trained on agent conversations and Kaafar’s earlier research. The conversations become both the source of customer intelligence and training material for Apate’s systems.
Customer figures come from Apate
Apate counts Commonwealth Bank of Australia and TPG Telecom among its customers. Joffe told TechCrunch that TPG had diverted nearly 590,000 calls to Apate’s agents, while Commonwealth had seen a 76% drop in publicly reported scam losses. He also said an unnamed Australian bank used Apate’s outbound agents to disrupt 22 scam campaigns.
Those figures describe results reported by the company and its commercial chief, rather than an independent comparison of the service with call blocking or other fraud tools. The details in the account point to what Apate is selling: not only time spent by its agents, but information that customers can use to spot or disrupt campaigns. Whether that intelligence changes fraud outcomes depends on what customers do with it.
Seed funding backs overseas expansion
Apate raised $8.15 million in seed funding in August from Lobby Capital, OIF Ventures, Investible, Concept Ventures and Baobab Ventures. Joffe said the 20-person company had raised just under $10 million overall. He said Apate plans to spend the new funding on its product and international expansion, including opening a London office and building a larger presence in the United States.
Apate is one of the finalists in TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield 200. The company is scheduled to pitch a panel of venture-capital judges during the event in San Francisco, which runs through October 15, 2026. The pitch puts its specific wager in front of investors: that engaging scammers can produce usable intelligence as well as waste their time.