Apate.AI Sends Undercover AI Agents to Gather Scam Intelligence

Apate.AI deploys thousands of AI agents that pose as potential scam victims, according to TechCrunch. The agents answer calls, respond to messages and emails, follow phishing links and enter online groups to engage suspected fraudsters.

The agents seek information such as bank accounts, crypto wallet addresses, phone numbers, malicious websites and impersonated brands. Customers, including banks, telecom companies, utilities and government agencies, can assign missions to collect specific details and review the results through an analytics portal.

Apate.AI says its agents have handled 2.5 million conversations and occupied 17 years of scammers' time. The company uses frontier models and its own tuned models, trained partly on conversations collected by its agents. Its customers include Commonwealth Bank of Australia and TPG Telecom, which has diverted nearly 590,000 calls to the service.