The consumer data broker Radaris.com, long notorious for ignoring requests to remove personal information from its vast network of online people-search services, has finally faced a severe reckoning. In a landmark legal development, a judge ordered that radaris.com and more than a dozen other data broker domains be transferred directly to the plaintiffs following a pattern of repeated stonewalling and evasive legal tactics by Radaris’s attorneys.
The enforcement action stems from a lawsuit filed in February 2024 by Atlas Data Privacy Corp, a company that has aggressively targeted data brokers alleged to be violating a stringent New Jersey statute known as Daniel’s Law. Named in honor of a tragic family incident involving a federal judge, the statute permits state law enforcement officials, government personnel, judges, and their families to have their personal information completely expunged from commercial data brokers and people-search services. Furthermore, the law imposes substantial financial penalties of $1,000 per violation against companies that ignore legitimate removal requests.
Less than a month after Atlas initiated its legal action, an investigative report published details regarding the co-founders of Radaris: Igor and Dmitry Lubarsky, Russian-born brothers residing in Massachusetts. The brothers operate a dizzying array of people-search companies alongside a network of Russian-language dating services and affiliate marketing programs.
Attorneys representing the Lubarsky brothers quickly threatened to initiate a defamation lawsuit if the report was not retracted and an official apology issued. Their legal counsel insisted that the initial reporting was inaccurate and claimed that the true owners of the enterprise were actually Ukrainian individuals residing in Ukraine.
Subsequent investigations further unmasked how the Lubarsky brothers built and operated Radaris and sister data broker companies behind a fictitious CEO. Radaris’s attorney, a Boston Law Group lawyer named Val Gurvits, ultimately admitted that his clients had fabricated the pseudonym "Gary Norden" and that Radaris had issued multiple press releases over the years quoting the fake executive while seeking capital from prospective investors.
When the litigation moved forward, attorneys for Radaris waited until the absolute last minute to appear in court and contest what appeared to be an inevitable default judgment in favor of the plaintiffs. They argued that Atlas had failed to properly serve the real owners and operators of Radaris and its various sister data broker entities.
In response, Atlas re-filed the lawsuit in June 2025, dramatically expanding the scope of the complaint to include a larger group of Radaris-affiliated data brokers accused of violating Daniel’s Law. Matt Adkisson, president and CEO of Atlas, noted that Radaris relied on a familiar playbook of judicial delay tactics and corporate shell games regarding its true country of origin and registered owners.
"We refer to this period as their island-hopping phase," Adkisson said, describing how privacy policies constantly shifted while new corporate entities materialized in jurisdictions such as the Marshall Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and the 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 added that when the defendants updated their terms of service to claim that Radaris was suddenly managed by a firm in the Marshall Islands, Atlas hired a local investigator and discovered that the newly cited management entity did not even exist.
This corporate labyrinth mirrors previous legal challenges. Mr. Gurvits previously represented Radaris in a 2017 class action lawsuit that the company temporarily lost because it failed to mount a defense in court. When the plaintiffs reported they could not collect a $7.5 million default judgment, the court ordered domain registry Verisign to transfer the radaris.com domain name to the plaintiffs. Mr. Gurvits successfully appealed that verdict, arguing that the lawsuit had failed to name the actual owner of the domain—a Cyprus-registered company named Bitseller Expert Limited—and that transferring the domain would violate due process rights.
The judge in that 2017 case ruled in favor of Radaris, halting the domain transfer. 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 matter never refiled their complaint.
"That seemed to be their modus operandi," said Raj Parikh, a partner at PEM Law in New Jersey who manages the Daniel’s Law litigation for 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."
Following multiple unheeded opportunities for the defendants to appear and defend against the allegations, the judge in the New Jersey case ruled against them on August 26. 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 directed against Radaris.com, which he argued is not a distinct 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," Worms stated. "He 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."
Although radaris.com remains prominent in search engine results for U.S. residents, the domain no longer functions as a commercial marketplace selling detailed personal dossiers. Its homepage now prominently displays a formal notice from Atlas detailing the court-ordered domain transfer.
Email Confirmations and Corporate Networks
During the course of the litigation, Atlas reportedly gathered more than 10,000 emails and internal documents. According to the plaintiffs, these messages substantiate findings regarding the actual ownership and operational structure of Radaris and its extensive network of subsidiary companies.
The correspondence allegedly demonstrates that nominal corporate 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 a small group of individuals using shared mailboxes, unified banking and payment channels, and 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," states an evidentiary summary shared by Atlas.
According to Atlas’s analysis of the obtained emails, 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, an advertising firm operating brands such as PeopleLooker, PeopleSmart, NumberGuru, and the vehicle history service Bumper.
Furthermore, the documentation purportedly shows that the Radaris family of websites earns up to $25,000 monthly from a partnership with Onerep, a service that markets individual data removal options. Investigative reporting previously revealed that Onerep’s founder had launched and operated numerous people-search websites over the years, maintaining control over platforms like Nuwber while simultaneously offering privacy remediation services.
To date, the New Jersey court has transferred 14 domain names associated with the Radaris network to Atlas.
The Road Ahead for Daniel’s Law
While the Radaris corporate network faces potential liabilities of $1,000 per violation under Daniel’s Law, the broader statute is currently confronting significant constitutional challenges. Roughly 150 other consumer data broker firms sued by Atlas have banded together to challenge the New Jersey law, arguing that it is overly broad and violates protections under the First Amendment.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has yet to issue a ruling on the constitutional validity of the statute, though legal observers anticipate the dispute will ultimately reach the U.S. Supreme Court. Meanwhile, at least 14 additional states have enacted legislation modeled after New Jersey’s law, with several others considering similar measures. However, a federal district court ruled West Virginia’s version of Daniel’s Law facially unconstitutional under the First Amendment in August 2025.
Justin Sherman, a privacy researcher and author of the upcoming book The Middlemen, which explores the data broker industry’s role in modern surveillance, noted that federal lawmakers have long faced intense lobbying from technology sectors resisting restrictive 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 said.
Sherman emphasized that people-search companies will continue to operate profitably unless Congress enacts comprehensive consumer privacy and data protection frameworks tailored to contemporary realities. Most state-level privacy laws explicitly exempt public and government records, such as voting registries, property filings, marriage certificates, motor vehicle records, criminal histories, court files, death records, professional licenses, and bankruptcy documents.
While numerous states have implemented mandatory age verification laws for accessing adult online content, federal regulations still lack strict limits on how identity verification companies handle, store, or share scanned government credentials like driver’s licenses. The absence of such federal constraints was underscored by a security breach at IDScan.net, which exposed driver’s license records for more than 153 million Americans 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."
