APATE.ai, an Australian startup founded in 2024, runs a fleet of AI agents that pose as potential fraud victims to extract operational intelligence from scammers.
The agents answer scam calls, respond to fraudulent messages and emails, follow phishing links, and join social media groups where scammers operate. Their goal: keep fraudsters engaged long enough to reveal bank accounts, cryptocurrency wallet addresses, malicious domains, and brand impersonation tactics.
Apate.ai sells this harvested intelligence to banks, telecom companies, government agencies, and utilities. The company claims its agents have accumulated 2.5 million conversations and wasted 17 years of aggregate scammer time.
The play addresses a specific market gap. The FBI logged over 22,000 complaints of AI-related crimes in 2025, resulting in $893 million in losses. Investment scams alone accounted for $632 million. Fraudsters now use AI to conduct conversations and generate deepfake audio and video—reversing the asymmetry by using the same tools against them is an elegant business logic.
The founder, Dali Kaafar, built the company after personally receiving a scam call and deliberately keeping the caller occupied for 44 minutes. He recognized that every minute a scammer spends on a live target is a minute not spent on a real victim. Automating that engagement while extracting actionable intelligence turned a defensive tactic into a revenue model.
Apate.ai is a finalist in this year's Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco through Oct. 15. The company will pitch its model to venture capital judges.
