Spun out of Macquarie University in Sydney, the start-up has wasted the equivalent of 17 years of fraudsters’ time through 2.5 million conversations conducted by its decoy agents.
Everything started from a family picnic during which Dali Kaafar, a researcher at the Macquarie University in Sydney, kept a 44-minute swindler on the phone: as much time as the fraudster did not spend trapping real victims. In 2024, he fired Apate, a company that industrializes this tactic with thousands of AI agents pretending to be vulnerable targets.
Lures on all channels
These agents pick up fraudulent calls, respond to suspicious messages and e-mails, track phishing links and infiltrate into groups on social networks. Over the course of the exchanges, they supported scammers with bank account numbers, cryptocurrency wallets, telephone numbers and malicious site addresses, which then fed customers' defenses.
Apate claims to have conducted 2.5 million conversations, 17 years of lost time for fraudsters. The Commonwealth Bank combines a 76% decrease in reported losses, TPG Telecom hijacked 590,000 calls and another Australian bank dismantled 22 campaigns. The company, which has 20 people and raised $10 million (of which $8.15 million in August), is preparing an establishment in London and a strengthening in the United States.
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