Australian company Apate has deployed a global network of 200,000 AI personas that pose as gullible victims, wasting millions of hours of scammers’ time every month. This innovative form of scam-baiting has evolved into an industrial-scale anti-fraud tool that delivers measurable economic benefits to telecommunications companies and banks.
Key result: During six weeks of work with Australian telecom operator TPG, Apate’s bots handled 600,000 scam calls, wasted more than 500 days of scammers’ time, and prevented an estimated $13 million in potential losses.
Apate, a spin-out from Macquarie University, developed a system for deploying conversational AI bots at global scale. These bots imitate the behavior of naive victims who answer scam calls, deliberately prolonging conversations and forcing scammers to waste time on hopeless attempts to defraud them.
One of the company’s most unusual KPIs is the number of swear words frustrated scammers direct at the “stupid” victims. “We’re the only company in the world that tracks the number of F-words as part of our KPIs,” says Apate founder Dali Kaafar.
The system operates according to the following process:
Every hour a scammer spends talking to a bot is an hour they cannot use to target a real victim. Across 600,000 calls over six weeks, this creates a cumulative effect that drains resources from criminal networks.
Apate maintains a pool of 200,000 different AI personas, each with a unique background and speaking style. This diversity is critical: if all bots behaved the same way, scammers would quickly recognize the deception.
Each persona has unique characteristics, including age, occupation, and family status. The AI adapts its communication style to each situation, making the interaction as realistic as possible for the scammer.
Psychological effect: Scammers working in call centers operate under KPI pressure. Conversations with “endlessly stupid” victims demotivate them, reduce productivity, and increase staff turnover within criminal organizations.
The largest deployment of Apate’s technology took place in partnership with Australian telecom operator TPG Telecom. The pilot project began in late 2025 and quickly produced impressive results.
TPG Telecom integrated Apate’s solution into its voice-security infrastructure. Mavenir provided integration between its CallShield technology and Apate’s AI bots, creating a multi-layered protection system.
The savings estimate is based on the average losses associated with successful scam schemes:
The conservative $13 million estimate reflects only direct financial losses and does not include reputational damage or operational costs associated with processing complaints.
In addition to distracting scammers, Apate bots perform a critically important role by gathering actionable intelligence on criminal networks.
This intelligence is shared with banks, telecom operators, and law enforcement agencies across Australia, Asia, Africa, the United Kingdom, and Europe. The data is used to build blacklists, initiate investigations, and coordinate international operations.
Strategic value: Intelligence allows defenders to move from reactive protection to proactive prevention — stopping new attacks before they begin. This shifts the balance of power toward defenders.
Scam-baiting technology has emerged as a response to the exponential growth of AI-powered fraud. According to industry reports, AI-enabled scams increased by 1,210% in 2025, far outpacing the 195% growth of traditional fraud.
Scammers increasingly use AI to improve effectiveness:
Traditional anti-fraud methods can no longer keep up with the volume of attacks, which exceeds the capacity of human teams.
Apate is not the only company operating in this field. Several other projects are also developing AI-powered scam-baiting concepts.
New Zealand organization Netsafe developed Re:Scam, a tool focused on email scam-baiting. The system generates endless variations of responses to phishing emails, dragging scammers into pointless conversations.
Scam Buster, an open-source tool presented at the Black Hat conference, allows ordinary users to deploy their own AI bots for protection against scammers.
Major telecom operators and banks are integrating scam-baiting solutions:
Industry trend: Scam-baiting is evolving from entertainment-focused YouTube content into enterprise-grade solutions with measurable ROI.
Economic imperative: With ROI at these levels, deploying scam-baiting systems becomes less a question of “if” and more a question of “when.” Companies that fail to invest in such solutions may face a competitive disadvantage.
Using AI to deceive scammers raises interesting ethical and legal questions.
2026 outlook: Apate predicts that 2026 will become a “reset year” for the scam economy. Reactive protection methods are becoming outdated, requiring a fundamentally new approach.
The success of scam-baiting technologies contains important lessons for different stakeholders.
To understand the value of scam-baiting, it is useful to compare it with traditional approaches.
| Method | Scalability | Proactivity | ROI |
|---|---|---|---|
| Blacklists | High | Reactive | Medium |
| Human agents | Low | Reactive | Low |
| Rule-based filters | Medium | Partially proactive | Medium |
| AI scam-baiting | Very high | Proactive | Very high |
AI-powered scam-baiting represents a fundamental shift in how fraud is fought. Instead of relying solely on passive protection or reactive responses, these systems actively attack the economics of criminal operations, making scams less profitable and more risky.
Apate’s success demonstrates several key principles:
For telecommunications companies and banks, deploying scam-baiting systems is becoming more than a nice-to-have — it is turning into a competitive necessity. With estimated ROI of 2,000-5,000% and a payback period of less than three months, the economic case is compelling.
Strategic imperative: In a world where scammers use AI to scale their operations, defenders must use AI to scale protection. This is no longer simply a choice — it is becoming a requirement for survival in the digital economy.
“The best defense is a good offense. In cybersecurity, that means not merely blocking threats, but actively exhausting attackers’ resources and making their operations unprofitable.”
— Bruce Schneier, cryptography and security expert
