AI Firm Deploys 200,000 Fake 'Victims' to Trap Online Scammers
Apate has unleashed 200,000 AI-powered decoys to waste scammers' time — and tracks success by how often fraudsters curse at the bots.
A company called Apate has launched a counteroffensive against online fraud by deploying 200,000 artificial intelligence-generated fake "victims" designed to lure scammers into lengthy, fruitless conversations, according to a report from Cointelegraph. The AI decoys pose as potential targets, engaging fraudsters long enough to drain their time and resources while protecting real people from harm.
The bots are apparently convincing enough to genuinely frustrate their targets. Apate has established an unusual internal performance metric to measure effectiveness: the company tracks on a monthly basis how many times scammers drop profanity — specifically F-bombs — at the AI personas, treating that emotional response as a signal that the decoys are successfully derailing criminal operations.
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The approach represents a growing trend of using artificial intelligence offensively against cybercrime, flipping the script on fraudsters who themselves increasingly rely on AI tools to scale their schemes. By occupying scammers with fake targets, platforms like Apate's aim to reduce the bandwidth bad actors have to pursue real victims.
While the source material does not detail the specific types of scams being targeted or Apate's broader business model, the deployment of 200,000 simultaneous AI personas suggests a significant technical infrastructure purpose-built for scam disruption at scale. The sheer volume of decoys implies the system is designed to overwhelm fraud networks rather than intercept individual bad actors.
Continue reading at Cointelegraph.
