AI Today: The AI agents that answer scam calls on purpose

An Australian startup called Apate runs thousands of AI agents whose job is to get scammed. They answer scam calls, reply to phishing emails and join dodgy investment groups, posing as ordinary people of different ages, accents and languages. The aim is to keep a scammer talking long enough to learn the bank account, crypto wallet or phone number they are using, then pass it to the banks and telcos that pay for the service.

AI Today is a series from Fíor, a natural language classifier that predicts whether a piece of text was more likely written by a person or by AI. Each piece explains one development in AI and shows where the claims come from.

What happened

TechCrunch reported on Apate this week. The company came out of research at Macquarie University in Sydney and was founded in 2024. Its customers include Commonwealth Bank of Australia and TPG Telecom. In August it raised US$8.15 million in seed funding, led by Lobby Capital, and it has since reincorporated in the US.

The idea started with one call. According to TechCrunch, Apate's chief executive once kept a scammer on the phone for 44 minutes during a family picnic. Those were 44 minutes the scammer did not spend on a real victim.

Why it matters

Most fraud defence starts after contact. Telcos block numbers once they are reported. Banks flag payments once they are made. Apate's pitch is to get the scammer's details before anyone loses money.

It also shows how far AI has moved into fraud on the other side. The FBI received more than 22,000 complaints in 2025 that mentioned AI, with reported losses of over $893 million. An AP and FRONTLINE investigation in June found scam centres in Myanmar using software built on ChatGPT and Gemini to work across dozens of languages.

So the same tools now sit on both ends of the call. A scammer may be using a model to write the messages. The victim replying may be a model too.

What is not known

Almost every result here comes from Apate. The company says its agents have held 2.5 million conversations and wasted 17 years of scammers' time. Its co-founder told TechCrunch that TPG has diverted nearly 590,000 calls to the agents, and that Commonwealth Bank has seen a 76% drop in publicly reported scam losses. None of these figures has been independently checked. The 76% figure also does not say how much of the drop is down to Apate.

TechCrunch's report also came out while Apate was pitching at TechCrunch's own startup competition.

The FBI figure is narrower than it looks. It counts complaints where AI was mentioned. The FBI notes that many victims may not know AI was involved at all.

Then there is the question of whose time is being wasted. The FBI says crypto investment scams are largely run by criminal groups in Southeast Asia using victims of human trafficking as forced labour. Keeping a caller busy does not necessarily cost the people running the operation. Apate's answer is that the time matters less than the account numbers and wallets its agents bring back.

For years the advice has been to assume the voice on the line might not be who it says. Soon it may not be anyone at all, on either side.

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