The consumer data broker Radaris.com has long maintained a notorious reputation for ignoring requests to remove personal information from its vast network of online people-search services. That operational strategy recently caught up with the company in a major legal showdown alleging that Radaris violated a strict New Jersey privacy law providing for hefty fines against data brokers that publish personal information belonging to state law enforcement officials. Faced with repeated stonewalling, evasive tactics, and prevarication by attorneys representing Radaris, the judge presiding over the case ordered that radaris.com and more than a dozen other data broker domains be transferred directly to the plaintiffs.
In February 2024, Radaris was sued by Atlas Data Privacy Corp, a company that has been actively pursuing data brokers alleged to be violating a New Jersey statute known as Daniel’s Law. The statute permits state law enforcement officials, government personnel, judges, and their families to have their personal information completely removed from commercial data brokers and people-search platforms. Furthermore, the legislation provides for statutory fines of $1,000 per violation against companies that ignore or fail to comply with legitimate removal requests.
Less than a month after Atlas filed its initial lawsuit against Radaris, security investigative reporting published a deep dive into the company’s co-founders, Igor and Dmitry Lubarsky—Russian-born brothers residing in Massachusetts who operate a sprawling network of people-search companies alongside a variety of Russian-language dating services and affiliate marketing programs.
Attorneys representing the Lubarsky brothers subsequently threatened to file a defamation lawsuit unless the investigative reports were removed and a formal apology was issued. Their legal counsel asserted that the reporting was wildly inaccurate and claimed that the true owners of the company were actually Ukrainian nationals living in Ukraine.
Investigative journalists doubled down on their findings, demonstrating how the Lubarsky brothers built and operated Radaris and other data broker entities using a fictitious CEO’s identity. Follow-up reporting revealed that Radaris’s attorney—a lawyer with the Boston Law Group named Val Gurvits—admitted that his clients had invented the pseudonym "Gary Norden" for the executive. Documents showed that Radaris had also issued multiple press releases over the years quoting this fake CEO while actively soliciting investments from potential financial backers.
Attorneys for Radaris waited until the absolute last minute to appear in court and contest what was all but certain to be a default judgment in favor of the plaintiffs. Once present, they told the court that Atlas had failed to properly serve the real owners and operators of Radaris and several associated sister data broker companies.
In response, Atlas re-filed the lawsuit in June 2025, dramatically expanding the number of Radaris family data broker entities accused of violating Daniel’s Law. Matt Adkisson, president and CEO of Atlas, stated that Radaris simply resorted to a tried-and-true operational playbook: delaying proceedings in court until the final possible moment while playing shell games regarding the true country of origin and the individuals listed as owners and operators of the sites.
"We refer to this period as their island-hopping phase," Adkisson said. "Privacy policies changed constantly, and new entities kept appearing from places like the Marshall Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and Seychelles. Behind the scenes, it felt like a shell game. Defense lawyers told the court that certain entities merely operated the domains and were the proper parties to sue. But by the time a judgment neared, those entities would be discarded and new entities would appear. Meanwhile, the lawyers claimed the other entities that actually owned the domains should not be held responsible."
Adkisson noted that when the defendants updated their terms of service to assert that Radaris was suddenly managed by a company located in the Marshall Islands, Atlas hired a local investigator in that jurisdiction. They quickly discovered that the brand-new entity Radaris claimed was managing its operations did not even exist yet.
Mr. Gurvits previously stepped forward as Radaris’s attorney in a class-room lawsuit the company temporarily lost in 2017 because it failed to contest the claims in court. When the plaintiffs in that matter informed the judge that they could not collect on a $7.5 million default judgment, the court ordered the domain registry Verisign to transfer the radaris.com domain name directly to the plaintiffs.
Mr. Gurvits appealed that verdict, arguing that the lawsuit had failed to name the actual legal owners of the Radaris domain name—a Cyprus-based company called Bitseller Expert Limited—and contended that taking the domain away would violate their constitutional due process rights.
The judge in the 2017 case ultimately ruled in Radaris’s favor, halting the domain transfer and instructing the plaintiffs that they could refile their complaint. Shortly thereafter, the designated operator of Radaris shifted from Bitseller to Andtop Company, an entity formed in the Marshall Islands in October 2020. The plaintiffs in that specific action never refiled their lawsuit.
"That seemed to be their modus operandi," said Raj Parikh, a partner at PEM Law in New Jersey who handles the majority of the Daniel’s Law litigation on behalf of Atlas. "In the past, they won by attrition. Plaintiffs’ attorneys tired of the procedural games and just gave up. That strategy worked for a decade, and it probably would have worked in this case too, since any financial recovery from foreign actors will be difficult. But we were acutely aware of the threat this website posed to law enforcement officers and other public officials in New Jersey, and decided early on to commit whatever time and resources were necessary to remove that threat."
On August 26, the judge presiding over the New Jersey case determined that the defendants had been given multiple opportunities to appear and defend the claims brought against them but had consistently failed to do so. Mr. Gurvits declined to comment on the outcome, stating that the matter had been reassigned to another attorney, Victor Worms. In response to inquiries, Mr. Worms asserted that the New Jersey court transferred Radaris.com to Atlas as part of a default judgment entered against Radaris.com, which he argued is not a valid legal entity.
"We have made a motion to vacate that default judgment on the grounds that it is void since a non-entity has no legal capacity to sue or be sued," Mr. Worms replied. "क्चर We also intend to pursue all appropriate appeals because we believe the transfer of Radaris.com amounts to a forfeiture in violation of various constitutional principles."
While radaris.com still appears prominently in search engine results when individuals look up U.S. residents by name, the domain no longer functions as a storefront selling detailed personal dossiers on millions of Americans. Its homepage now prominently displays an official notice from Atlas, alongside links to prior investigative reporting detailing the background of Radaris.
Email Confirmations
Atlas disclosed that it has successfully obtained more than 10,000 emails and internal documents throughout the course of the litigation. According to the firm, these messages corroborate previous investigative findings regarding the true owners and operators of Radaris and its sprawling network of interconnected corporate entities.
Atlas stated that the emails definitively establish that the nominal legal vehicles—including Radaris America, Inc., Bitseller Expert Limited, Digital Orbit Corp, Core Solutions Group Inc, Lucky Solutions Inc, Virtura Corp, Veripages Inc., Nuform Solutions Inc., Growth Data Advisors Inc., and Property Experts, Inc.—are all administered by the exact same group of three or four individuals utilizing the same mailboxes, sharing centralized banking or payment card setups, and managing operations from a single virtual office address.
"The corpus establishes, with documentary evidence generated independently by banks, payment processors, hosting providers, registrars, software-as-a-service vendors and the operators’ own systems, that radaris.com and at least twenty-five other people-search websites are one operation run by a small Boston-area group whose administrative, financial and technical functions sit on the difive.com mail domain and its successors (centerex.com, scienteco.com, eprofit.com, realmo.com, pub360.com)," reads a summary shared by Atlas.
According to financial figures uncovered by Atlas and detailed in the communications, Radaris.com generates approximately $42,000 per month, while a sister site, Veripages.com, brings in roughly $45,000 monthly through partnerships with the Lifetime Value Company, a marketing and advertising firm operating consumer brands such as PeopleLooker, PeopleSmart, NumberGuru, and the vehicle history platform Bumper.
Atlas also revealed that the Radaris family of websites pulls in up to $25,000 each month via partnerships with Onerep, a company that markets services to help individuals remove their personal information from people-search directories. Earlier reporting exposed how the Belarusian founder of Onerep had launched and operated dozens of people-search sites over the years while continuing to operate platforms like Nuwber, effectively perpetuating the cycle of data brokering while selling the remedy.
In total, the New Jersey court has transferred 14 distinct domain names belonging to the Radaris network of companies over to Atlas. Radaris.com now exclusively redirects visitors to the formal notification regarding the court-mandated domain transfer.
The Road Ahead
The Radaris corporate family still faces potential statutory fines of $1,000 per alleged violation of Daniel’s Law. For the time being, however, the broader enforcement of Daniel’s Law faces a significant constitutional challenge mounted by virtually all of the 150 consumer data broker firms currently being sued by Atlas.
In response to the litigation, the data broker industry has successfully maneuvered to have at least 70 of the Atlas lawsuits transferred to federal court, challenging the constitutionality of the New Jersey statute on the grounds that it is overly broad and violates First Amendment protections. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has yet to issue a definitive ruling on the constitutional challenge, but legal observers widely anticipate that whichever side prevails, the case will ultimately be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Concurrently, at least 14 other states have enacted legislation modeled after New Jersey’s Daniel’s Law, with additional state legislatures weighing similar measures. However, a federal district court in West Virginia ruled that state’s version of Daniel’s Law facially unconstitutional under the First Amendment in August 2025.
Justin Sherman, a privacy expert and author of the forthcoming book "The Middlemen," which explores how the data broker industry underpins modern surveillance capitalism, noted that federal lawmakers have long encountered intense technology industry lobbying against restrictive data privacy laws. He added that numerous powerful sectors are now actively working to prevent the passage of comprehensive federal data privacy legislation.
"These days at the federal level, add in the intense amount of lobbying against these laws from social media companies, big tech, cryptocurrency firms, and now AI proponents in the mix who claim that limiting their data scraping is somehow going to collapse the whole U.S. economy under Chinese rule," Sherman observed.
Sherman emphasized that people-search companies will continue to thrive unless and until the U.S. Congress enacts meaningful consumer privacy and data protection laws appropriate for the 21st century. This persistence stems from the fact that virtually all state-level privacy regulations exempt records categorized as "public" or "government" documents, which include voting registries, property filings, marriage certificates, motor vehicle records, criminal histories, court documents, death records, professional licenses, and bankruptcy filings.
While at least 25 states have implemented laws requiring age verification for individuals attempting to access adult content online, there remains no overarching federal statute governing how private companies that scan driver’s licenses can use, share, or retain the collected data. The absence of such strict statutory limits contributed directly to recent security breaches, such as the incident at IDScan.net that exposed the driver’s license information of more than 153 million Americans after records were temporarily weaponized as an identity theft service on the dark web.
"The average person can look at Daniel’s Law and have a perfectly normal reaction, which is that everyone should be covered, not just police and judges," Sherman said. "But we don’t need more wake-up calls. We’ve had eight million wake-up calls already on the need for better privacy laws. The lack of comprehensive federal privacy law is not for a lack of knowledge, and anyone claiming otherwise is either not reading the news or kidding themselves."
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