Apate says its 200,000 AI scam-bait bots are tying up fraudsters and gathering crypto intelligence

Australian tech firm Apate says it has built nearly 200,000 AI personas designed to pose as plausible scam victims across phone calls, social media and messaging apps, with the aim of tying up fraudsters and collecting useful intelligence. Founder Dali Kaafar told Cointelegraph Magazine that the company handles hundreds of thousands of calls and conversations a day, and even tracks how often angry scammers swear at the bots as a monthly KPI. In the six weeks leading up to the end of 2025, Apate said its bots handled 600,000 scam calls for Australian telco TPG, wasting more than 500 days of scammers’ time and equating to roughly $13 million in prevented losses. The company says its systems are also used to extract actionable data for banks, telcos and a blockchain analysis client, including newly used crypto wallet addresses and scam methods before funds move. Kaafar said the idea began after he spent 44 minutes stringing along a scam caller during a family picnic in Sydney in November 2021. The project later received funding from Australia’s Office of National Intelligence, spun out of Macquarie University in 2023, and now works with major Australian banks as well as banks in the UK, South Africa and Southeast Asia.