Apate

• Diverting calls a telco's network already flags as scams to Apate bots instead of simply blocking them, and feeding the extracted numbers and tactics back into blocking rules
• Forwarding scam calls that reach a bank's or brand's inbound call centre to Apate rather than to human agents
• Deploying text personas on WhatsApp and Telegram with a mission to surface mule accounts and crypto wallets for a bank's fraud team to freeze or investigate
• Detecting impersonation campaigns that use your brand while they are still being run, and alerting customers early
• Building an exportable evidence trail of proactive scam disruption for regulators, for example under Australia's Scam Prevention Framework
• Giving law enforcement or government agencies campaign-level intelligence that links phone numbers, scripts and payment infrastructure

Apate is not a security tool in the pentesting sense, and nothing else in this list does what it does: it treats scam traffic as a source of intelligence instead of something to drop. For a bank or telco that already detects scams, the value is what comes out of each conversation: mule accounts before money reaches them, wallets, numbers and impersonated brands, delivered with a record that can be shown to regulators. The model depends on someone upstream routing scam traffic to it (your network, your call centre, or Apate's own text bots), so judge it as an addition to existing fraud controls, not a replacement. Expect a sales process, no public pricing and little public technical documentation, and treat the scale and loss-avoidance figures as vendor claims to test in a pilot.

About Apate

Most anti-scam tooling blocks or flags fraud after it shows up. Apate, a company founded in Sydney out of research at Macquarie University's Cyber Security Hub and since reincorporated in the United States, does the opposite: it lets scammers reach a target on purpose, and the target is one of thousands of AI personas with different ages, genders, accents and languages. Apate Voice is the telco product. A carrier or a business call centre routes calls it has identified as suspected scams to Apate over SIP/RTP, and voice bots fine-tuned on scam-baiting calls (with reinforcement learning aimed at longer conversations) keep the caller talking while capturing scripts, impersonated brands and payment details. Apate says this integration can be deployed on-premises, in a private cloud or as a hybrid, and that it is cloud-agnostic across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud and Oracle. Apate Text works without any telco: Apate runs bots on WhatsApp, Telegram and SMS, crawls forums, investment and crypto groups and social channels to find scammers in groups and one-to-one chats, and can give personas assets such as bank accounts and IDs plus specific missions, for example obtaining a wallet address or a mule account. Apate's 2026 funding and Mobileum announcements also list email among its channels, although its product pages describe only voice and text. Everything flows into Apate Insights, a dashboard and alerting layer that separates active intelligence (payment instruments, emails, names) from passive intelligence (impersonated organisations, campaigns, unusual activity), and keeps transcripts and exportable, timestamped records that fraud teams can use for regulatory reporting, such as under Australia's Scam Prevention Framework. For banks, Apate describes ScamStrike, which engages a scam number as soon as it surfaces, and its blog describes a deployment with Commonwealth Bank's fraud team in which a small team oversees thousands of simultaneous conversations. Apate also reaches carriers through a partnership with telecom analytics vendor Mobileum, which integrates Apate's agents with its Active Intelligence Platform. The tradeoffs are that this is a managed, sales-led service with no public pricing, trial, API documentation or self-serve access; it adds an intelligence and disruption layer on top of your existing detection rather than replacing it; individuals cannot buy it (protection reaches consumers only through their telco or bank); and the scale and loss-avoidance figures Apate publishes are its own and vary between announcements.