Australian tech company Apate has deployed a wide array of AI-bot characters worldwide that play innocent scam victims to waste billions of hours of artists’ time every month.
Ironically, one metric of the company’s monthly performance is how often desperate scammers swear off stupid ‘victims’ who are playing dumb and stringing them along.
“I think we’re the only company in the world that’s actually putting as part of their KPI the number of f-words that scammers are dropping at them,” Appet founder Dali Kafer told the magazine with a laugh.
The company has around 200,000 AI characters capable of holding believable phone conversations and chatting on social media and messaging platforms.
“I can tell you that we’re basically serving, as we call them, hundreds of thousands of calls a day and hundreds of thousands of conversations on other channels,” he says.
Every hour they waste an artist’s time is not another hour they are scamming members of the public. In the six weeks to the end of 2025, Apate’s bot made 600,000 scam calls to a single telco in Australia, TPG.
“Basically, we wasted over five hundred days of the scammers’ time,” he explains. “That equates to roughly thirteen million dollars in savings.”
Another goal of the bots is to generate actionable intelligence for banks and telcos to tackle scam rings across Australia, Asia, Africa and the UK and Europe.
Apate deals with scammers through bot chat. Source: Apate
Scam baiting with AI victims
Kaffer said he got the idea in November 2021 when he received a scam call while picnicking with his family in Sydney.
To his wife’s chagrin, but to his children’s delight, he held the scammer off for 44 minutes, pretending to be a gullible rube for the scam.
“What followed was really a whole comedy show for my kids,” he says, adding that during the call he also learned a lot of potentially useful information about the mechanics of the scam and the techniques used.
“When I hung up on that call, I remember thinking very clearly: If I can do this just for fun, imagine what technology can do at scale.”
While working as a professor at Macquarie University at the time, he raised the idea with some of his doctoral students working on AI and security.
“I said, ‘Guys, there’s got to be a better way to do this. Let’s build something that really automates this whole process of engaging scammers, but perhaps most importantly, extracting all kinds of intelligence from these conversations.’ And that’s literally how it started.”
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Within a few months, they want to secure funding from the Office of National Intelligence Research The idea, and the project was launched in Apate from the university in 2023. The company now works with most of Australia’s major banks as well as numerous banks in the UK, South Africa and South East Asia.
Apate is far from the only company scamming using AI bots – although they’re doing it to a greater degree than most. United Kingdom telco O2 launched an AI granny campaign last year, frustrating scammers while talking about its 28 cats. It was as much an advertising campaign to warn the public about the dangers of scam calls as anything else.
O2’s highly entertaining AI Granny. Source: 02
Creating the perfect AI victim
Apate launched with 120 different personas across different genders, ages and personality types and now has 197,000 people with identifiable vocal tics, accents and the same sounds people make when trying to think of what to say.
“We’ve spent a lot of time refining and creating these AI bots that sound just like you and me and our neighbors,” he says.
The AI models were trained on “hundreds” of hours of recorded conversations between human scammers and fraudsters, so they could implement counter-strategies.
“They know they’re talking to the bad guys, if you will, and they really navigate the conversation so that it seems very realistic to any scammer out there, even if a scammer is suspicious of things.”
Bots are sent to WhatsApp and Telegram to act as honeypots for scammers. While the old cliché that you can’t scam an honest person isn’t true, it’s still possible to exploit a scammer’s desire for money.
“They’re really cybercriminals. I think we often forget that they’re cybercriminals trying to save people’s lives. And so the element of greed sometimes exploits our bots as well.”
The bot gathers valuable intel from each scam call
In the crypto industry, Apate works for “one of the leaders in blockchain analysis” which may or may not be chainanalysis. They’re not interested in wasting the scammers’ time – they want intelligence on which wallets and methods the scammers are using so they can track the flow of funds.
“These bots, as they engage in various conversations, churn out new crypto wallet addresses by the hundreds and thousands,” he says. “It’s data and intelligence that’s literally coming in before they’re harmed.”
Scamming is big business, and call centers are “pretty much a corporate entity,” Kaffer explains
“This data is very, very important because, literally, it’s the new account or the new wallet where you really have to pay a lot of attention. Because that’s where these … scammers are collecting their money or their funds.”
“Think of it as literally always being ahead of the scammer’s tactics. And the more you know before money is transferred, the better.”
In July, Apate’s bots opened a marketplace for brokers to verify bank accounts in India, paying commissions of up to 5% in USDT on proceeds from scams through the accounts.
Apt’s human workers in Sydney. Source: Apate
AI arms race between good guys and bad guys
Scammers are increasingly using AI bots, and it won’t be long before AI scammers become as ubiquitous as spam email. Cheating people a $1.24 trillion Businesses, therefore, can afford the calculations required to increase industrial activity.
Apate’s research suggests that about 20% to 30% of scam text conversations already employ AI, but Kaffer isn’t too worried about the results of anti-scam bots fighting scam bots.
He says their researchers believe AI bots have an advantage in defense, according to game theory, because they’re trying to extract intelligence, while scam bots are trying to get another AI to perform an action.
“You can also demonstrate mathematically that this is to the advantage of a defender because it becomes easier to extract intelligence from an attacker’s AI model,” he says.
“We can imagine a world where scammers become more sophisticated and deploy this kind of technology. But that means that if they do, they’re actually supposed to lose the game, which is great news in the fight against scams.”
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