Apate AI agents get scammed on purpose to catch fraudsters
Apate's AI scambaiting agents have run 2.5 million conversations with scammers to collect bank accounts and tactics. What small businesses should copy from it.
Australian startup Apate.ai runs AI agents that pretend to be scam victims, keep fraudsters talking, and pull out the bank accounts, crypto wallets and scripts they use. Banks and telcos buy the intelligence. It is a clever use of AI agents, and it carries a lesson for any small business: scammers run a repeatable playbook, so your defense should be a repeatable playbook too.
What actually happened
TechCrunch profiled Apate at Disrupt 2026, where it was a Startup Battlefield 200 finalist. The company was founded in 2024 from research at Macquarie University in Sydney by CEO Dali Kaafar.
Its agents pose as victims with different ages, accents and languages. They answer scam calls, reply to phishing emails and texts, follow malicious links and join social media groups. Customers can assign missions, such as getting a specific mule account number. Apate says its agents have run 2.5 million conversations and wasted 17 years of scammers' time. TPG Telecom has diverted almost 590,000 calls to them. Commonwealth Bank of Australia is a customer.
Apate raised an $8.15 million seed round in August and plans a London office and a bigger U.S. presence. TechCrunch also cites FBI data: more than 22,000 complaints about AI-related crimes in 2025, with about $893 million in losses.
We dropped one claim from our summary. The article mentions a 76% drop in reported scam losses at Commonwealth Bank, but it does not show that Apate alone caused it. Banks run many controls at once.
Why AI scam intelligence matters for your business
Scammers script. So should you. Apate works because fraud is a script with a few variations: fake invoice, changed bank details, urgent gift card request from "the owner." Write down the five scripts that target your business and the one response to each.
Verify on a second channel. If an email asks to change where you send payment, call the vendor on the number you already have. Not the number in the email. This one rule stops most invoice fraud, and no AI is required.
Your phone line is the attack surface. Voice agents and cloned voices make "the boss called and said wire it" easier to fake. Agree on a code word for money movements. It is low-tech and it works.
Key takeaways
- Apate's AI agents pose as scam victims to collect accounts, wallets and tactics from fraudsters
- The company reports 2.5 million scam conversations; TPG Telecom diverted almost 590,000 calls to it
- FBI data cited: about $893 million lost to AI-related crimes in 2025
- Its customers are banks, telcos and governments, not small businesses
- Copy the method: document scam scripts and verify payment changes on a second channel
Does a bank-detail change in your AP inbox trigger anything? We build payment-change checks into invoice and approval workflows, so a new account number waits for a human callback before money moves. Tell us how your payables run.
Sources: TechCrunch.
- #apate
- #ai-agents
- #scam-prevention
- #fraud
- #business-security
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