Apate’s 200,000 fake AI ‘victims’ are so good at scam baiting, the company has a monthly KPI for how many F-bombs scammers drop at the infuriating bots.
Australian tech firm Apate deploys a vast array of AI-bot characters worldwide that play the role of gullible scam victims to waste millions of hours of con artists’ time each month.
Hilariously, one of the company’s monthly performance metrics is how many times frustrated scammers swear at the idiot ‘victims’ who are playing dumb and stringing them along.
“I think we’re the only company in the world that is actually keeping as part of their KPIs the number of F-words that scammers are dropping at them,” Apate founder Dali Kaafar tells Magazine with a chuckle.
The company has a stable of almost 200,000 AI characters that are able to hold convincing phone conversations and to chat on social media and messaging platforms.”I can tell you that we’re basically servicing, as we call them, hundreds of thousands of calls a day, and pretty much hundreds of thousands of conversations on the other channels,” he says.
Every hour of a con artist’s time they waste is another hour they’re not scamming a member of the public. In the six weeks up to the end of 2025, Apate’s bots engaged in 600,000 scam calls for a single telco called TPG in Australia.
“Essentially, we wasted more than five hundred days of scammers’ time,” he explains. “That roughly equates to somewhere around thirteen million dollars being saved.”
The bots’ other goal is to elicit actionable intelligence for banks and telcos to combat scam rings across Australia, Asia, Africa and the UK and Europe.
Apate bots deal with scammers via chat. Source: Apate
Kaafar says he got the idea when he received a scam call while having a picnic with his family in Sydney back in November 2021.
To his wife’s annoyance, but his kids’ delight, he strung the scammer along for 44 minutes by pretending to be a gullible rube falling for the scam.
“What followed was really literally a full comedy show for my kids,” he says, adding that during the call he’d also learned a lot of potentially useful information about the mechanics of the scam and the tactics used.
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