A property investment company breached privacy laws by sharing the names and addresses of people going through a divorce or financial distress with participants of its wealth-building classes, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner has found.
Master Wealth Control Pty Ltd (DG Institute), whose director was the prominent Sydney property investor Dominique Grubisa until July, offers courses and mentoring programs on property and business investment.
The privacy watchdog said state court lists and subscription services, such as Core Logic, were used to find properties belonging to people in distressed situations for a “Weekly On and Off Market Leads List”.
The leads list included personal details such as the full names, addresses and Google Maps links to the addresses, as well as a description of the personal situation leading to the sale and the agents and solicitors involved, the court decision read.
The list was a part of the 12-month Elite Mentoring Program, which costs participants between $25,000 and $30,000.
Grubisa said she could not provide any comment “due to on-going legal matters”.
In a separate judgment in July, the federal court fined DG Institute $6m and ordered a payment totalling $14.7m to more than 1,200 participants after findings of faulty or misleading representations.
The redress orders made by the court require DG Institute to refund consumers an amount equivalent to the course fees paid by more than 2100 students who enrolled in the MWC program between April 2017 and November 2022.
“The substantial consumer redress orders, the penalties imposed and the five-year disqualification order against Ms Grubisa reflect the serious nature of the conduct, and clearly demonstrate the consequences of making false claims when promoting goods or services to consumers,” the ACCC commissioner, Liza Carver, said at the time.
Grubisa was disqualified from managing corporations for five years but has still appeared in promotional material for the company. She is not prevented from doing so.
After the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner started investigating the use of the leads list in July 2022, they were taken out of the course, the privacy commissioner, Carly Kind, wrote in her judgment.
“Although from the middle of 2022 the respondent removed the names of individuals from the leads list, the respondent provided participants of the Program with the tools and directions on how to re-identify individuals,” Kind wrote.
The company continued to distribute leads lists which said they could not give the property owners names, but instructed participants on how to find them, the court decision said.
“You can search for the owner’s name by following the steps in the ‘Searching for Leads’ manual and the ‘Sourcing Distressed Properties’ resource,” the materials said.
“You can find these great resources by going to your member portal > click on your Property Elite Mentoring > click on Help Documents > and find the resources there.”
Kind found the information was not collected in a fair and lawful way because the individuals involved “did not have any knowledge or hold a reasonable expectation” they would appear on lead lists.
“In those circumstances, individuals would not have reasonably expected that their personal information would be collected by the respondent from the daily court listings,” she wrote.
Kind said the company had also failed to take steps to notify the people whose information was going on the lists and ensure the information was accurate and up to date.
“Just because a direct marketing database identifies someone by a certain name as having occupied a certain address at some point in time, does not necessarily mean that they are the same person mentioned in a Court List or indeed that they own any given property,” she wrote.
Kind found it had interfered with the privacy of individuals on the list and ordered the company to stop distributing the lead lists, and destroy all the information about them that it held.
