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Sydney-based fraud and intelligence firm Apate.ai has partnered with the Commonwealth Bank (ASX: CBA) to create a digital ‘honey pot’ for scammers - deploying thousands of conversational bots to lure in criminals who target victims via phone and text, wasting their time while quietly gathering intelligence.
Founded in 2024 by Professor Dali Kaafar, Apate.ai deploys bots that are engineered to engage scammers and disrupt their operations, with the AI able to mimic a broad range of personas encompassing different genders, age groups, personalities, emotions and even languages.
A Macquarie University spin-out, Apate.ai secured a $500,000 government grant last year to pilot its anti-scam tech, just as the Commonwealth Bank expressed interest in tapping its intelligence.
According to the Consumer Action Law Centre, Australians lost more than $2 billion to scams in 2024, with nearly half a million victims left to pick up the pieces emotionally and financially.
It’s a problem founder and CEO Kafaar is tackling through a commercial partnership with Commonwealth Bank, using Apate.ai’s technology to feed valuable scam intelligence to the bank’s internal systems, sharpening its ability to detect threats, trigger customer alerts and block scams in real time.
Speaking to Business News Australia, Kafaar explained how the company operates a network of decoy phone numbers designed specifically to be found and exploited by scammers.
“The bot basically engages the scammers by pretending to be that perfect victim. Our approach includes continuous monitoring, intelligence sharing and the bot is adaptive to the scammer’s tactics. The bots are really engineered to detect these scammer patterns and avoid engaging with, you know, with things that are outside of their remit,” Kafaar explained.
“We would be after specific intelligence while the scammers are pretending to be an organisation - What sort of tactics are they using? What's the script? Any sort of personal intelligence or personal information that they're asking their victim to provide them with. These are the details that we extract from the scammers. “
“Knowing that a particular institution is being impersonated and that scammers are launching a massive-scale campaign against Australians with a specific script is something that we would like to know as soon as it happens, right? This is what you call emerging scam trends. That generates alerts and blocks for customers, which is great.”
Identifying emerging scam trends, such as large-scale impersonation campaigns using specific scripts, allows institutions like Commonwealth Bank to act swiftly, triggering real-time alerts and blocks to better protect customers.
This is the first major banking collaboration and deployment for the startup, which has also garnered interest from other banks and companies based in Southeast Asia, the US, South America and Europe.
For Kafaar, it’s just one piece of a far bigger puzzle - globally, scammers are estimated to have siphoned off more than $1 trillion last year alone, according to the Global State of Scams report by the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and Lisbon-based fraud detection giant Feedzai.
“We like to think about the considerations of fraud as to how we can detect them and how we really could make sure that we do not fall for traps. But I think it's really all about flipping the script against these scammers by being proactive in the approach to this problem, which is becoming a global epidemic,” he said.
“We're talking about tens of thousands of calls being made on a daily basis here in Australia. Each of these calls carries the potential of a heartbreak somewhere. We're losing hundreds of billions globally to this. In Australia, we are losing billions of dollars to scammers on a yearly basis. Some people are really losing their whole life savings, as you know.
“I see us really moving towards flipping the script against this whole fraud industry with a mission. Our mission is certainly happening in action, which is to disrupt their business model, make it really as unprofitable as possible - hurting them where it's the most painful.”
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