In 2024, Australians lost more than $2 billion to scammers through investment, romance and other scams with almost half a million reported incidents.
Researchers at Macquarie University have partnered with Apate.ai to tackle this real-world problem, with a department-funded Australia's Economic Accelerator (AEA) Seed grant.
Apate.ai is a fraud prevention and intelligence platform programmed to use conversational, realistic and multilingual artificial intelligence (AI) bots to prevent scammers from stealing victims’ money by engaging in long fake conversations.
Apate.ai works collaboratively with government agencies, financial institutions and telcos to combat scammers. The interactions between scammers and Apate.ai bots provide critical intelligence about scammers' tactics, identifying impersonated organisations and new scam campaigns in real-time.
Apate.ai co-founder Peter Eckermann said the AEA seed funding has allowed them to transform Apate.ai from a promising idea into a market-ready solution.
“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.
“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.”
Apate.ai CEO Professor Dali Kaafar said their AI technology is presently being used by one telco to block almost 10,000 scam calls a day.
“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,” Dali said.
“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.”
Apate.ai has expanded its Australian operations with their technology being used to prevent scams in the United Kingdom and South-East Asia.
The AEA Seed pilot program has invested more than $26 million in 100 research projects around the country to support research commercialisation.
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