Australians have lost $150 million to scammers so far this year, and at least one bank is fighting back in a very unusual way.
They’re using AI in a very big way.
An Army Of 10,000 AI Bots Take On Scammers In Realtime
Commonwealth Bank is deploying an army of fake AI bots to waste scammers’ time and disrupt their scam operations.
The bank has launched 10,000 voice bots and 25,500 messaging bots that impersonate real Australians in an attempt to keep scammers so busy, they can’t defraud real people.
They launched the bots after they launched a pilot program in 2024 and they say “hundreds and thousands” of scam calls have been diverted since that time.
Uniquely Australian and Uniquely Human Sounding
The voice bots have been trained to sound Australian as well as have the personality, humor and speech patterns unique to the region. The bots are able to mimic a real person so scammers will engage with them over long periods of time.
They Partnered With An AI Company To Bring The Bots To Life
The bank partnered with Abate.ai, a company that can deploy AI bots at scale. Their purpose is to disrupt the scammers business model and they are looking to partner with other banks to do the same thing.
The tech behind the bots uses a sophisticated honeypot strategy that delibrately attracts scammers.
Thousands of dedicated phone numbers are distributed across the internet, across scam applications and on websites that the scammers harvest their contact information. When scammers call these numbers thinking they have reached a victim, they are instead engaging with AI bots.
The AI employs “advanced analytics” that can adapt and change the conversation based on what the scammer is saying.
They Can Waste Up To 55 Minutes Of A Scammers Time
James Roberts, the banks head of fraud explains that the bots are highly effective and that their longest recorded call last 55 minutes.
The scammers had no idea that they were interacting with a bot and continued to speak with the bot for close to an hour.
The AI Bots Will Also Collect Intelligence
The AI bots have been deployed to do more than just waste scammers time. They are also being used to collect intelligence from scammers conversations and then feed that information back into Commonwealth’s fraud detection systems.
Roberts says the intelligence gathering will have “a huge multiplier effect” by allowing them to improve fraud in realtime as scammers change their methods.
And if your worried about the AI bots taking fraud analyst jobs, don’t be. He reports that no employees lost jobs due to the bot deployment. Roberts called it “a complete innovation where AI has actually unlocked an ability to go further and deeper in making criminal syndicates’ profitability less.”
Not The First To Deploy An AI Bot Army
While Commonwealth is the first bank to deploy an AI Bot Army, they are not the first to think of that.
Kitboga launched his AI Bot army in March of this year to take on scammers at scale. He even broadcast them in action each week on his YouTube channel.
Like Commonwealth, his AI Bots serve several purposes as well – to educate consumers, waste scammers time and then to feedback the intelligence into solutions.
The data collected through the AI bots feed a security application he created called SeraphSecure, a software he designed to protect people from scams and remote connections these scammers use to defraud people.
