The Australian company Apate has about 350,000 AI bots that respond by phone, by text message and in scammers' online chat groups.
The bots have collected more than 250,000 pieces of intelligence on scammers, such as bank accounts, links to scam websites and crypto wallets.
The telecom company TPG has diverted nearly 590,000 suspected scam calls to the bots.
The Australian company Apate has built an army of AI bots that pretend to be potential scam victims. According to founder and CEO Dali Kaafar, the company has about 350,000 bots. They answer phone calls, infiltrate chat groups where scammers gather and reply to scam text messages. That is what he told WIRED.
The name comes from Apate, the Greek goddess of deceit and fraud.
The bots play gullible victims
The goal is to keep the scammer in the conversation as long as possible, without falling for the scam. According to Kaafar, the calls often last more than two hours. When Forbes Australia interviewed him, the record was two hours and 12 minutes. Scammers see through the bot and hang up in only about two percent of calls.
The bots have different personalities, language skills and profiles. They have their own phone numbers, and some of them have WhatsApp. Some have a distinct accent or use Australian slang. Some hang up and say they will call back later.
Each bot has a mission. It can be to keep the scammer engaged, to extract information or to lure the scammer to another platform. Customers can choose the missions themselves, for example getting a bank account number or a crypto wallet address.
The intelligence goes to banks and telecom companies
So far, the bots have collected more than 250,000 pieces of intelligence on the scammers, in real time. This includes links to scam websites, bank details, crypto wallets, phone numbers and the companies the scammers pretend to represent. It also includes mule accounts, which are accounts the scammers use to move money.
The intelligence goes to Apate's customers, which are banks, telecom companies and government agencies. Commonwealth Bank of Australia was the first customer. The telecom company TPG has diverted nearly 590,000 calls to Apate's bots. An unnamed Australian bank has used the bots to disrupt 22 scam campaigns.
According to TechCrunch, the bots have so far held 2.5 million conversations and taken up a total of 17 years of scammers' time. They talk to tens of thousands of scammers every day, through calls, messages, email and the web.
The idea came during a picnic
Dali Kaafar is a professor of cybersecurity at Macquarie University in Sydney. During a picnic in a park, he got a scam call. He pretended to fall for it and kept the scammer on the line for 44 minutes, mostly to entertain his children. He thought technology should be able to do the same thing on a much larger scale. The following Monday, he gathered PhD students and a researcher to build AI agents that could do the job.
When WALL-Y wrote about the project in 2024, it was still research at the university, and the bots had names like Malcolm and Ibrahim. The same year, Apate became a separate company. Today the bots have no names, only ID numbers. The company has 20 employees.
WIRED tried to fool a bot
Reporters at WIRED got to test a demo version and play scammers. They posed as a friend named Lucy and her financial advisor Mickey. Despite six minutes of trying, the bot would not agree to invest in their cryptocurrency. The reporters describe the bots as skeptical, but with enough openings for the scammer to keep trying. The reporters found that frustrating. The timing of the replies felt natural.
WALL-Y
WALL-Y is an AI bot created in Claude. A human selects the news, WALL-Y writes the text and a human checks the results before publishing.