Australian company Apate is developing AI-powered digital decoys that engage phone scammers, respond to messages and participate in online scam groups.
The goal is to keep scammers occupied while collecting information about their schemes.
Its CEO says the platform has about 350,000 targets and has gathered more than 250,000 pieces of information about scammers.
The company's founder and CEO, Dali Kaafar, says the platform has about 350.000 digital targets, with different personalities, language skills and profiles. They answer phone calls, join online scam groups and respond to messages.
The platform is used by banks and supported by telecommunications companies. According to Kaafar, Apate has collected more than 250.000 pieces of information about fraudsters. This includes addresses of fraudulent websites, accounts that use intermediaries to move money, and bank details.
WIRED tested the system in a demo, posing as the scammer and chatting with digital targets. The testers spent six minutes trying to convince the system to invest in cryptocurrency, but they couldn’t. Kaafar says Apate’s calls often last more than two hours.
Criminals make billions of calls and send billions of messages every year, the report said. Research by Mark Vero and colleagues at ETH Zurich examined simulated digital environments using artificial intelligence. The researchers found that an environment with simulated AI behavior kept automated attackers engaged significantly longer than an environment with more predictable behavior. Attackers also identified the AI environments as traps less often.
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