Case Study
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The man with the Australian accent in this video is no ordinary victim of a phone scam. He’s an AI bot programmed to disrupt the activities of scammers by engaging them in lengthy conversations.
Australians lost more than $2 billion to scammers in 2024 through investment, romance and other scams. It’s a real-world problem that researchers at Macquarie University are tackling with the support of an Australia’s Economic Accelerator Seed grant.
Apate.ai, a spin-out from Macquarie University, uses conversational, realistic, multilingual AI bots to keep scammers on long fake calls, diverting them away from the many victims who lose money to global cybercriminals every day.
Apate.ai works collaboratively with government agencies, financial institutions and telcos as part of collective efforts to combat scammers.
Scammers are all too happy to spend time on the phone swindling their victims, but the artificial intelligence technology that Apate.ai deploys is helping to turn the tables.
The interactions between scammers and Apate.ai bots not only disrupt the scammers, but they also provide critical intelligence about scammers’ tactics, identifying impersonated organisations and new scam campaigns in real-time.
It’s a crucial example of how university research can be translated into commercial ventures that solve real-world problems.
The Australian Government’s National Anti-Scam Centre reported that Australians lost $2.03 billion to scams in 2024, with 494,732 reported incidents.
The top 5 scam types by loss in 2024 were investment scams ($945 million), romance scams ($156.8 million), payment redirections ($152.6 million), remote access ($106 million) and phishing ($84.5 million).
Encouragingly, there was a 25.9% decrease in losses from scams compared to 2023, which the National Anti-Scam Centre attributes in part to the sort of disruption efforts Apate.ai and their partners are undertaking
Apate.ai founder and CEO Professor Dali Kaafar said their AI technology is presently being used by one telco to block almost 10,000 scam calls a day.
‘Our bots are engaging with these scammers for up to 54 minutes, which is the longest conversation we have had as part of deployment,’ Dali said.
‘In total, across all conversations had by our bots, we were able to divert 600 hours of scammers' time away from the network per month.
‘With an average scam loss of $2,365 according to ScamWatch Australia, we estimate that we are helping prevent over $1.7m of scam losses per month.’
The company is also deploying text capabilities to address WhatsApp and Telegram scams, utilising an army of bots to distract, delay and disrupt scammers.
‘Our AEA seed funding has allowed us to transform Apate.ai from a promising idea into a market-ready solution, solving real problems for customers around the world,’ Apate.ai co-founder Peter Eckermann said.
‘With this funding, we’ve been able to harness cutting-edge AI research to protect Australians from financial harm while building a safer digital ecosystem,’ Peter said.
As they continue to commercialise the technology, Apate.ai is looking to expand their partnerships within the telco and financial sectors to protect a broader range of customers and consumers.
‘We continue to enhance our AI to tackle more sophisticated scams. Our voice capabilities are getting better and more realistic by the day and have been specifically trained on scam conversations and adapted to more than 12 languages,’ Peter said.
The company has expanded its Australian operations offshore, with their technology being used to prevent scams in the United Kingdom and South-East Asia.
‘Scams are a global epidemic but by combining the expertise of academia, industry and government, we’re tackling one of the most pressing cybersecurity challenges of our time,’ Dali said.
AEA Seed grants support proof-of-concept projects to bridge the gap between research outcomes and commercialisation.
