Quick Summary

Commonwealth Bank of Australia runs thousands of AI personas on phone numbers designed to attract scammers. When a scammer calls or texts, a bot keeps them talking, collects intelligence on their methods and feeds it into the bank's fraud systems. Hundreds of thousands of scam calls have been diverted since late 2024.

The Use Case

Phone scams caused Australia's largest financial losses in 2024, and text messages were the second most common way scammers made contact. Instead of only defending, CommBank partnered with Apate.ai to go on offense. Apate.ai spins up thousands of conversational bots a day, each with a different age, gender, tone and cultural background, attached to phone numbers seeded where scammers find them. The bots take the calls, play along for as long as they can, and log the scripts, requests and payment details scammers use. Those insights flow into CommBank's scam controls in near real time and are shared with other banks and telcos.

Real Example

1. A scammer dials a number harvested from a leaked list; a bot answers as a 70-year-old retiree
2. The scammer runs a "your account has been compromised" script
3. The bot asks confused questions and keeps the scammer on the line for 20 minutes
4. The bot logs the script, the callback number and the bank account the scammer wants money sent to
5. Those details feed CommBank's scam controls within minutes
6. A real customer's transfer to that account is flagged and held the same afternoon

Why It Matters

• Hundreds of thousands of scam calls diverted to bots since the late-2024 pilot
• Thousands of bots running every day, each conversation producing intelligence
• "Every minute a scammer is engaging with a bot, is a minute they're not targeting an Australian," per James Roberts, General Manager of Group Fraud

Source

https://www.commbank.com.au/articles/newsroom/2025/06/apate-ai.html