MONA founder David Walsh’s secretive wagering company surveilled analyst Sean O’Toole: court documents

Private eyes and court orders: How a mysterious betting company hunted down a former analyst accused of stealing million-dollar gambling code.

David Walsh’s temple of sex and death, the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, is funded by his gambling riches.

A secretive wagering company that counts MONA founder David Walsh as a director hired private investigators to find one of their data analysts before suing him, claiming he was stealing confidential information to run his own book.

Data Processors, which was established in 1999, sells data about betting odds for sporting events generated by algorithms that have been developed over 20 years.

And although it counts Mr Walsh, a mathematician who funded the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart using some of the fortune he made gambling, as a director it has kept a low public profile.

Data Processors is in a court fight with Sean O’Toole after an anonymous tip-off led it to accuse him of odds theft for which it is seeking damages. Mr O’Toole is defending the action.

David Walsh. Photo: MONA/Jesse Hunniford

The company approached the NSW Supreme Court in 2023 asking for approval to carry out searches on his property to find proof Mr O’Toole had allegedly secretly installed code on Data Processors’ systems to gather proprietary betting probabilities for thoroughbred, harness and greyhound racing.

But they couldn’t find him when they tried.

An application for preliminary discovery was made in April 2023 according to the NSW Supreme Court judgment at the time.

“Mr O’Toole is a full-time employee of the plaintiff. The plaintiff claims that Mr O’Toole has breached duties he owes as an employee of the plaintiff by misusing confidential information concerning betting odds in relation to sporting events which the plaintiff generates and sells to customers as part of its business.

“As a first step, the plaintiff proposes to seek search orders against Mr O’Toole. In order to be able to do so, the plaintiff needs to know where Mr O’Toole can be found.”

The judgment said Mr O’Toole worked from home but it appeared he did not live at the address supplied to his employer.

MONA’s David Walsh.

“That address was surveilled by a private investigator on 12, 14, 15 and 17 April 2023 for substantial parts of the day, but there was no evidence that Mr O’Toole lives there,” the judgment said.

Mr Walsh’s company ultimately obtained court orders allowing it to serve notices on internet service providers, a mobile network and a bank to locate Mr O’Toole.

“Sophisticated software” was surreptitiously installed on Data Processors’ network to extract betting data and send it to an external IP address, according to a separate judgment in a further matter, also by NSW Supreme Court judge Michael Ball.

The software was installed by somebody using Mr O’Toole’s username and password, it alleged.

“The data is clearly confidential. It is the type of data that Data Processors generates and sells to customers, which is the core part of its business,” Justice Ball said.

Justice Ball said he was satisfied Mr O’Toole had “important evidentiary material”, indicating that he used the data. He said it could also reveal who Mr O’Toole shared it with.

Mr O’Toole appeared to be operating a syndicate, Justice Ball said.

“Data Processors first became aware that code may have been surreptitiously installed on its systems when it received an anonymous email tipping it off to that possibility,” he said.

David Walsh was one half of the Punters Club. Picture: Supplied

Mr O’Toole was employed by Data Processors in May 2017 as an analyst and rose to a stage four quantitative analyst position. In that role, Mr O’Toole gathered sporting data for American basketball and baseball.

A more recent development, published in a subsequent judgment by now retired NSW Supreme Court judge James Stevenson, revealed multiple former employees have been accused of misappropriating the betting data.

While they, including Mr O’Toole, accept that Data Processors is entitled to get promises from them that they will hand over the data or destroy it if they can’t, they “put in issue the plaintiff’s entitlement to damages or an account of profits”.

Four of the five defendants in effect admit liability, and the remaining defendant, Michael Demos, did not deny liability. The others are Joel Caley, Kusuv Bhandari and Richard Zhang.

Mr Walsh told an investment conference in 2022 that he was approached by fellow Tasmanian gambler Zeljko Ranogajec, who is known as “The Joker”, and the two men eventually built up a professional group called the Punters Club.

The club was wagering huge amounts by the mid-2000s according to reports. In 2011, the Australian Tax Office said Mr Ranogajec and Mr Walsh needed to pay income tax on tens of millions of dollars of winnings from previous years in a matter they subsequently settled.

Mr Ranogajec moved to London and found a new business partner, according to the Wall Street Journal. He was part of a partnership which scored a $US57.8 million jackpot win in the Texas lottery in 2023 by buying 99.3 per cent of the possible draw outcomes. Their gambit set off a discussion about whether the state had been hoodwinked and limited how many tickets a terminal can print in a day.

The case against Data Processors’ former employees is ongoing.

Originally published as MONA founder David Walsh’s secretive wagering company surveilled analyst Sean O’Toole: court documents