Apate's AI Bots Pose as Victims to Stall Phone Scammers

An Australian company called Apate has built an AI system that routes phone, chat, and messaging scammers into conversations with bots designed to look and sound like real victims, according to WIRED. The bots are instructed never to fall for the scam but to keep the scammer talking for as long as possible.

How Does the Apate System Work?

Apate — named for the Greek goddess of deception — diverts incoming scam calls, text messages, and chat-group messages onto AI personas built to sustain a conversation rather than end it quickly. "What we really like to think is that we're building the perfect victims for scammers," said Dali Kaafar, the company's founder and CEO, per WIRED. Kaafar said a scammer spending a minute talking to a bot is a minute not spent reaching "hundreds, if not thousands" of real people, since automated dialing tools let scammers run many calls at once, he told WIRED.

How Convincing Are the AI 'Victims'?

WIRED reporters Lily Hay Newman and Matt Burgess tested a demo version in which the user plays the scammer against one of Apate's AI personas. They described the experience as "intensely frustrating," noting the bot expressed "a healthy amount of skepticism" while leaving enough openings for a scammer to keep trying to close the con. In their test, the two reporters tag-teamed the bot playing a friend, "Lucy," and her fiancé, and found the system "engaged and responsive," with timing that "felt natural," according to WIRED. Kaafar said real Apate calls with scammers regularly run more than two hours.

How Many Bots Are in Use?

Apate's platform — used by banks and backed by telecom companies, per WIRED — currently runs roughly 350,000 bots, Kaafar said. Beyond answering phone calls, the bots infiltrate scam chat groups and respond to text messages, each with distinct personalities, language skills, and profiles so scammers don't easily spot the pattern. "Sometimes they do have WhatsApp, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they pick up the phone, sometimes they just actually hang up on the scammer," Kaafar told WIRED, describing the bots' human-like inconsistency.

What Intelligence Do the Bots Collect?

Apate says it has gathered more than 250,000 pieces of information about fraudsters in real time, including scam URLs, money mule account details, and bank information, according to Kaafar's comments to WIRED. The company pitches that data to partner banks and telecoms as a byproduct of the time-wasting itself, rather than as the primary goal.

What Should Readers Watch For?

• Scam calls that seem unusually long or circular may increasingly be AI decoys rather than real negotiating victims, a dynamic Apate is designed to exploit.
• Banks and telecoms partnering with Apate gain scam intelligence — URLs, mule accounts, bank details — that could feed faster blocklists.
• Scammers may adapt their scripts to detect bot skepticism patterns, which could push both sides toward more sophisticated AI tactics, per the mechanics described in WIRED's reporting.

For the full account of Apate's testing and Kaafar's remarks, see WIRED's original report.