The Sydney Startup Wasting Time For Scammers with AI

A Sydney-based startup is taking a novel and aggressive approach to fighting the global plague of online scams: instead of just deleting the fraudulent messages, they are using an army of AI chatbots to waste the scammers' time, a practice known as "scambaiting."

The company, "Apate," named after the Greek goddess of deceit, has developed a sophisticated AI platform that can engage with phishing emails, fraudulent SMS messages, and social media scams, leading the criminals on a wild and time-consuming goose chase. As millions in Nigeria and around the world know all too well, these scams can be devastating, but Apate is now fighting back.

How It Works: Drowning Scammers in Deception
Users who receive a scam email can forward it to Apate's platform. The system's AI then takes over, creating a fake persona and initiating a conversation with the scammer. The AI is designed to be the "perfect victim"—gullible, slightly confused, and always promising to send the money or information "just after one more question."

The AI can:

Engage in long, nonsensical conversations that can last for weeks.

Generate fake documents like ID cards and bank transfer receipts to prolong the charade.

Ask endless, frustrating questions to tie up the scammer's time and resources.

The goal is simple but effective: every minute a scammer spends talking to an Apate AI chatbot is a minute they are not spending defrauding a real human victim.

Turning the Tables on the Criminals
"For years, the advice has been to just 'delete and ignore,' but that does nothing to stop the scammers," one of the Apate co-founders explained in a recent interview. "We decided it was time to turn the tables. We are making the business of scamming less profitable by wasting their most valuable asset: their time."

The startup is already seeing impressive results. They report that their AI agents have collectively wasted over 500,000 hours of scammers' time since the platform's beta launch earlier this year.

Apate offers a free service for individuals and is also developing a commercial product for businesses to help protect their employees from targeted phishing attacks. The startup is a powerful example of a new, more proactive approach to cybersecurity, where instead of just building defensive walls, we can now send out an army of digital decoys to actively disrupt the enemy.