Most companies deploy AI agents to accelerate product development or streamline workflows. Apate.ai, however, sends them undercover—straight into the path of scammers.

Founded in 2024 based on research conducted at Macquarie University in Sydney, this Australian startup unleashes thousands of AI agents that pose as unsuspecting victims. These agents are capable of answering scam calls, replying to suspicious messages and emails, clicking on phishing links, and infiltrating social media groups to lure fraudsters. They adopt personas spanning different ages, genders, and accents, communicating in multiple languages as they work to keep scammers occupied long enough to extract valuable intelligence.

The company reports that its network of agents has collectively wasted 17 years of scammers' time across 2.5 million conversations. But for Apate's clientele—which includes banks, telecom providers, government agencies, and utilities—the real value lies in what the undercover agents can coax scammers into revealing. These details typically only surface after someone has already fallen victim: bank account numbers, crypto wallet addresses, phone numbers, malicious websites, the brands being impersonated, and other specifics about the fraudulent operations. (The company will pitch a panel of VC judges at Disrupt, which is taking place this week at Moscone West in San Francisco through Thursday, October 15.)

This represents an unusual twist on scam-baiting, though perhaps not a surprising one given how much AI has emboldened scammers and hackers. The FBI logged over 22,000 complaints of AI-related crimes in 2025, with losses totaling approximately $893 million. Investment scams accounted for more than $632 million of that figure, with the FBI noting that fraudsters leverage AI to conduct conversations and create deepfakes of celebrities, executives, and trusted figures. For years, people have turned stringing scammers along into a hobby—sometimes with hilarious results, like convincing scammers to read entire books aloud or even getting ridiculous tattoos. Now, as AI becomes increasingly sophisticated, the dynamic is shifting. Interestingly, the inspiration for Apate came from a genuine scam call.

Several years back, Apate's founder and CEO Dali Kaafar was attending a family picnic when an unknown number appeared on his phone. Recognizing it as a scammer, he chose to feign ignorance for his children's amusement and managed to stretch the call out for 44 minutes. Everyone got a good laugh, but Kaafar realized those were 44 minutes the scammer wasn't spending targeting a real victim. It was also 44 minutes of his own time wasted—which got him thinking: could this be automated, and could something useful be learned in the process? That notion eventually evolved into research at his position at Macquarie University, where Kaafar and his team applied machine learning and natural language processing to analyze scam call content and develop improved methods for detecting and preventing fraud. "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. Our AI agents talk to tens of thousands of scammers every day across calls, messages, email and the web. What we offer our customers is what comes out of those conversations, and what they can do with it."

Joffe explained that Apate employs both frontier models and its own fine-tuned models to drive its agents and analysis. The company trains its models on conversations its agents have had with scammers, along with the research Kaafar conducted at Macquarie. Beyond accessing Apate's fleet of agents, customers receive an insights portal providing intelligence and analytics on scams targeting their end users or employees, brands, products, and more. Customers can even assign specific missions to these agents, such as obtaining a bank account number or crypto-wallet address. The text agents can scan forums, investment groups, and social platforms for potential scam activity, then engage in conversations using fabricated identities to uncover scammers' details. Among the startup's customers are Commonwealth Bank of Australia, TPG Telecom, and other utilities, telcos, and government agencies. Joffe noted that TPG has redirected nearly 590,000 calls to Apate's agents, Commonwealth has experienced a 76% decrease in publicly reported scam losses, and an unnamed Australian bank working with the startup has used its outbound agents to disrupt 22 scam campaigns.

Investors are wagering that there's profit to be made from outsmarting scammers as well. Apate secured $8.15 million in seed funding in August from Lobby Capital, OIF Ventures, Investible, Concept Ventures, and Baobab Ventures. Joffe stated that the 20-person company has raised just under $10 million total and intends to allocate the latest round toward product development and international growth, including establishing an office in London and expanding its presence in the U.S.

"Apate is named after the Greek goddess of deception, which felt appropriate given what our agents do," Joffe said, adding that the startup even includes clips of scammers cursing at the bots in its pitch materials. "We track that as a sign of frustration and every swear word gets celebrated by us at Apate. We are probably one of the only businesses in the world that celebrates when people swear at our product."