The consumer data broker Radaris.com has long maintained a stubborn reputation for ignoring requests to remove personal information from its vast empire of online people-search services. That operational impunity finally caught up with the company recently in a landmark lawsuit alleging that Radaris violated a strict New Jersey privacy law providing for hefty financial penalties against data brokers that publish the personal information of state law enforcement officials. In the face of repeated stonewalling, legal prevarication, and procedural shell games by attorneys representing Radaris, a New Jersey judge ordered that radaris.com and more than a dozen other related data broker domains be forcibly transferred to the plaintiffs.
In February 2024, Radaris found itself the target of a major lawsuit filed by Atlas Data Privacy Corp, a company aggressively pursuing data brokers accused of violating a New Jersey statute known as Daniel’s Law. Named in honor of Daniel Anderl—the son of U.S. District Judge Esther Salas, who was tragically murdered at their home in 2020 by an aggrieved attorney—the statute empowers state law enforcement officials, government personnel, judges, and their immediate families to have their personal information completely expunged from commercial data brokers and online people-search directories. Furthermore, the statute establishes robust financial penalties of $1,000 per violation against companies that willfully ignore or fail to comply with valid removal requests.
Just under a month after Atlas initiated its legal action, KrebsOnSecurity published an exhaustive investigative deep dive into the elusive co-founders of Radaris: Igor and Dmitry Lubarsky, also known as Lybarsky. The brothers, Russian-born citizens living in Massachusetts, operate a dizzying and complex array of people-search companies alongside a network of Russian-language dating services and affiliate marketing programs.
Attorneys representing the Lubarsky brothers quickly responded to the publication by threatening a defamation lawsuit unless the investigative report was immediately removed and a formal retraction issued. Their legal counsel asserted that the reporting was wildly inaccurate and insisted that the true owners of the enterprise were actually Ukrainian citizens living in Ukraine.
However, KrebsOnSecurity doubled down on its findings, demonstrating precisely how the Lubarsky brothers built and operated Radaris and a constellation of sister data broker companies while hiding behind a fictitious CEO. A follow-up investigative report revealed that an attorney representing Radaris—a Boston Law Group lawyer named Val Gurvits—admitted that his clients had fabricated the pseudonym “Gary Norden” for their chief executive officer. Radaris had even issued multiple corporate press releases over the years quoting this fake executive while actively seeking capital from potential investors.
Legal Shell Games and the Island-Hopping Phase
When the initial legal proceedings commenced, attorneys for Radaris waited until the absolute last minute to make a court appearance and contest what appeared to be an inevitable default judgment in favor of the plaintiffs. Once they appeared, they argued that Atlas had failed to properly serve the real owners and operators of Radaris and its various sister entities.
Undeterred, Atlas re-filed the lawsuit in June 2025, dramatically expanding the scope of the litigation to include a much larger roster of Radaris-family data brokers accused of violating Daniel’s Law. Matt Adkisson, the president and CEO of Atlas, stated that Radaris simply leaned on a tried-and-true operational playbook: dragging out court proceedings until the absolute last moment and playing an intricate shell game regarding the true country of origin and the individuals legally listed as owners and operators of the websites.
“We refer to this period as their island-hopping phase,” Adkisson explained. “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 claim 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 legally exist yet.
Mr. Gurvits had previously stepped forward as legal counsel for Radaris in a 2017 class-action lawsuit that the company temporarily lost because it failed to contest the claims in court. When those plaintiffs informed the judge that they were unable to 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 successfully appealed that verdict, arguing that the lawsuit had failed to name the actual owners of the Radaris domain—a Cyprus-based company called Bitseller Expert Limited—and that executing the domain transfer would consequently violate their constitutional due process rights. The judge in that 2017 case ultimately ruled in Radaris’s favor, halting the domain transfer and instructing the plaintiffs to re-file their complaint. Shortly thereafter, the designated operator of Radaris shifted from Bitseller to Andtop Company, an entity incorporated in the Marshall Islands in October 2020. The plaintiffs in that specific action never re-filed their lawsuit.
“That seemed to be their modus operandi,” said Raj Parikh, a partner at PEM Law in New Jersey, who manages the bulk of 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.”
On August 26, the judge presiding over the New Jersey case ruled that the defendants had been granted multiple fair opportunities to appear and defend against the claims, yet repeatedly failed to do so. Mr. Gurvits declined to comment on the outcome of the case, indicating 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 specifically targeting Radaris.com, which he argued is not a recognized 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. “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 searches for U.S. residents by name online may still bring up references to Radaris in search engine results, the domain no longer functions as a commercial storefront selling detailed personal dossiers on millions of Americans. Instead, its homepage displays a formal notice issued by Atlas detailing the court-ordered domain transfer, alongside links to prior investigative reporting exposing the company’s inner workings.
Uncovering the Corporate Web Through Email Confirmations
During the course of the litigation, Atlas reportedly gathered more than 10,000 internal emails and corporate documents. According to the plaintiffs, these records conclusively substantiate previous reporting regarding the true owners and operators behind Radaris and its sprawling network of affiliate companies.
Atlas asserts that the communications definitively establish that various 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 small group of individuals using shared mailboxes, unified banking or payment card setups, 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 (centerex.com, scienteco.com, eprofit.com, realmo.com, pub360.com),” reads an analytical summary shared by Atlas.
Financial data extracted from the emails indicates that Radaris.com generates approximately $42,000 per month, while a sister site, Veripages.com, pulls in roughly $45,000 monthly through partnerships with the Lifetime Value Company—a marketing and advertising firm that oversees brands such as PeopleLooker, PeopleSmart, NumberGuru, and the car history service Bumper.
Furthermore, Atlas revealed that the Radaris family of websites earns up to $25,000 monthly through an ongoing partnership with Onerep, a privacy-oriented company that markets services helping individuals remove their personal information from people-search platforms. Previous investigative reporting revealed that the Belarusian founder of Onerep had similarly launched and operated dozens of people-search sites over the years, continuing to manage platforms like Nuwber while simultaneously selling services to clean up the digital footprint left by such brokers.
To date, the New Jersey court has transferred 14 distinct domain names belonging to the Radaris network to Atlas. To mark the enforcement action, radaris.com now permanently redirects visitors to a notice informing them of the court-ordered asset transfer.
The Road Ahead for Daniel’s Law and Digital Privacy
Although the Radaris family of companies faces potential financial exposure totaling $1,000 per violation under Daniel’s Law, the statute itself is currently confronting a broad constitutional challenge. Roughly 150 other consumer data broker firms sued by Atlas have joined forces to push back against the legislation.
The broader data broker industry has coordinated efforts to transfer at least 70 of the active Atlas lawsuits into federal court, arguing that the New Jersey statute is unconstitutionally broad and violates protections guaranteed under the First Amendment. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has not yet rendered a decision regarding this constitutional challenge, though legal observers widely expect the ultimate resolution to wind up before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, at least 14 other states have enacted legislation explicitly modeled after New Jersey’s Daniel’s Law, with additional state legislatures weighing similar measures. However, the legal landscape remains fractured; 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 powers modern surveillance, noted that federal lawmakers have long faced intense, well-funded lobbying by technology interests attempting to block restrictive U.S. data privacy legislation. He pointed out that powerful corporate lobbies—spanning social media giants, big tech firms, cryptocurrency enterprises, and artificial intelligence advocates—frequently argue that placing limitations on data scraping will severely damage the U.S. economy.
Sherman emphasized that people-search companies will continue to thrive unchecked unless and until the U.S. Congress enacts meaningful consumer privacy and data protection laws tailored to the realities of the 21st century. Most state-level privacy laws routinely exempt records categorized as "public" or "government" documents—such as voting registries, property filings, marriage certificates, motor vehicle records, criminal histories, court files, death records, professional licenses, and bankruptcy filings—leaving commercial brokers with a legal goldmine of scrapable data.
While at least 25 states have implemented laws requiring age verification for users accessing adult content online, there remains no comprehensive federal statute restricting how companies scanning citizens’ driver’s licenses may collect, store, or share that sensitive data. Observers note that the absence of such baseline statutory restrictions directly contributed to major security failures, such as the recent breach at IDScan.net, which exposed the driver’s license records of more than 153 million Americans after the data was briefly repurposed into 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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