Apate is using artificial intelligence in an unusual role: willing victim. The Australian startup deploys voice and text agents that answer suspicious calls, messages and emails, then keep scammers engaged while collecting phone numbers, payment details, scripts and other indicators that banks and telecom companies can use.
The company says its agents have handled 2.5 million conversations and consumed the equivalent of 17 years of scammers’ time. Those figures are company-reported, not independently audited, but they illustrate the intended mechanism. Every minute spent talking to a decoy is time not spent targeting a real person, and every interaction can reveal how a campaign operates.
Apate grew from research at Macquarie University and was founded in 2024. It sells the resulting intelligence to institutions rather than asking consumers to interact with the bots. Its website describes tools for voice, text and fraud intelligence, including isolated environments that engage suspicious traffic. That separation is important because a defensive system should not expose customers or production networks to links and files sent by criminals.
Evidence and limits
TechCrunch reported that telecom customer TPG had diverted nearly 590,000 calls to the platform. Apate also cited a 76% decline in publicly reported scam losses at Commonwealth Bank and said another bank used its agents to disrupt 22 campaigns. Those examples suggest potential value, but they do not establish causation. Scam losses can change because of customer education, payment controls, law enforcement or reporting patterns.
The company raised $8.15 million in seed funding in August and has collected just under $10 million in total, according to management. It plans to expand in the United Kingdom and United States. That expansion will test whether its models can handle local accents, languages, laws and scam scripts without generating harmful false positives.
The commercial opportunity sits between fraud detection and threat intelligence. Success should be measured by verified campaign disruption, useful identifiers delivered to customers, reduced false positives and demonstrable loss avoidance. Privacy and retention rules also matter because the system records conversations and extracts personal data. Apate’s concept is compelling, but customers will need controlled trials and audited outcomes before treating the technology as a proven reduction in fraud losses.