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 pattern of defiance recently caught up with the company in a dramatic legal showdown alleging that Radaris violated a strict New Jersey privacy law providing for hefty fines against data brokers that publish the personal information of state law enforcement officials. Faced with repeated stonewalling and procedural prevarication by attorneys representing Radaris, a presiding judge ordered that radaris.com and more than a dozen other related data broker domains be transferred directly to the plaintiffs.
In February 2024, Radaris found itself the target of a lawsuit filed by Atlas Data Privacy Corp, a company that has actively pursued data brokers accused of violating a 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 family members to have their personal data completely scrubbed from commercial data brokers and people-search services. Furthermore, the law mandates severe financial penalties of $1,000 per violation for companies that deliberately ignore or bypass formal removal requests.
Less than a month after Atlas initiated legal proceedings against Radaris, investigative reporting published a deep dive into the elusive co-founders of Radaris: Igor and Dmitry Lubarsky, also spelled Lybarsky. The brothers are Russian-born U.S. residents living in Massachusetts who manage an extensive and convoluted portfolio of people-search companies, alongside a variety of Russian-language dating services and digital affiliate programs.
Attorneys representing the Lubarsky brothers quickly threatened to initiate a defamation lawsuit unless the investigative report was immediately retracted and a formal public apology issued. Their legal counsel vehemently asserted that the reporting was grossly inaccurate and claimed that the actual owners of the enterprise were, in fact, Ukrainian nationals residing in Ukraine.
Rather than backing down, investigators doubled down on their findings, illustrating how the Lubarsky brothers successfully built and operated Radaris and several sister data broker entities using a completely fictitious CEO. Subsequent reporting revealed that Radaris’s primary attorney—a lawyer with the Boston Law Group named Val Gurvits—admitted that his clients had fabricated the executive pseudonym "Gary Norden." Moreover, records showed that Radaris had issued multiple corporate press releases over the years quoting this fake chief executive while actively seeking capital from prospective investors.
Attorneys representing Radaris waited until the absolute last legal moment to enter an appearance in court to contest what appeared to be an inevitable default judgment in favor of the plaintiffs. Once present, they argued that Atlas had failed to properly serve the true, underlying owners and operators of Radaris and its associated sister companies.
In response, Atlas re-filed the lawsuit in June 2025, dramatically expanding the scope of the litigation to include a much larger roster of Radaris-affiliated data brokers accused of continuous violations of Daniel’s Law. Matt Adkisson, the president and CEO of Atlas, noted that Radaris leaned heavily on a tried-and-true corporate playbook characterized by endless court delays and shell games designed to obscure the true country of origin and the identities of the individuals controlling 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 recounted that when the defendants updated their terms of service to claim that Radaris was suddenly managed by a newly minted company in the Marshall Islands, Atlas retained a local investigator in that jurisdiction. They quickly discovered that the brand-new corporate entity Radaris claimed was managing its operations did not even legally exist yet.
Mr. Gurvits had previously stepped forward as the legal representative for Radaris in a separate class-action lawsuit that the company temporarily lost in 2017 because it failed to contest the allegations in court. When the plaintiffs in that matter 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 true legal owners of the Radaris domain—a Cyprus-registered firm called Bitseller Expert Limited—and that executing the domain transfer would consequently violate their due process rights. The judge in that 2017 case ultimately ruled in Radaris’s favor, halting the domain transfer and instructing the plaintiffs that they could re-file their complaint. Soon afterward, the listed operator of Radaris shifted from Bitseller to Andtop Company, an entity established in the Marshall Islands in October 2020. The plaintiffs in that older case ultimately never re-filed their complaint.
"That seemed to be their modus operandi," said Raj Parikh, a partner at PEM Law in New Jersey who manages the vast majority of 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 ruled that the defendants had been afforded multiple opportunities to appear and defend against the allegations but had repeatedly failed to do so. Mr. Gurvits declined to provide a comment regarding the latest ruling, indicating that the matter had been reassigned to another attorney, Victor Worms. In response to subsequent inquiries, Mr. Worms maintained that the New Jersey court improperly transferred Radaris.com to Atlas as part of a default judgment directed against Radaris.com itself, which he contended 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. "He added that they also intend to pursue all appropriate legal appeals because they believe the transfer of Radaris.com amounts to an unconstitutional forfeiture in violation of various fundamental legal principles."
Although radaris.com still appears prominently in search engine results when individuals search online for U.S. residents by name, the domain no longer functions as a commercial storefront selling detailed personal dossiers on millions of Americans. Its primary landing page now displays a prominent notice issued by Atlas, alongside direct links to prior investigative reporting detailing the inner workings of Radaris.
Email Confirmations
During the course of the protracted litigation, Atlas gathered more than 10,000 internal emails and corporate documents. According to the plaintiffs, these digital communications definitively corroborate prior reporting concerning the true owners and operators behind Radaris and its sprawling network of corporate fronts.
Atlas asserts that the correspondence establishes conclusively that 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 centrally administered by the exact same group of three or four individuals operating from identical mail servers. Furthermore, these entities share unified banking or payment card infrastructures and are managed collectively 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," reads a summary released by Atlas.
According to findings drawn from the recovered emails, Radaris.com generates approximately $42,000 per month in revenue, while a sister site, Veripages.com, brings in roughly $45,000 monthly through an active partnership with the Lifetime Value Company—a marketing and advertising firm whose portfolio includes people-search brands like PeopleLooker, PeopleSmart, NumberGuru, and Bumper, a vehicle history platform.
Additionally, the documents revealed that the Radaris ecosystem of websites generates up to $25,000 each month via partnerships with Onerep, a privacy service that markets itself as a solution for removing personal information from people-search directories. Previous investigative reporting uncovered that the Belarusian founder of Onerep had historically launched and operated dozens of people-search websites—continuing to run properties like Nuwber—thereby perpetuating the very industry from which the company simultaneously profited by selling removal services.
To date, the New Jersey court has successfully transferred 14 distinct domain names belonging to the Radaris family of companies over to Atlas. The flagship radaris.com domain now permanently redirects visitors to the formal notice detailing the court-ordered asset transfer.
The Road Ahead
While the Radaris corporate network still potentially faces severe statutory fines of $1,000 per proven violation of Daniel’s Law, the broader enforcement of the statute currently faces a substantial constitutional challenge. Virtually all of the roughly 150 consumer data broker firms targeted in separate lawsuits by Atlas have mobilized to contest the validity of the law.
The data broker industry successfully coordinated efforts to have at least 70 of the Atlas lawsuits removed to federal court, where they argue that the New Jersey statute is overly broad and an unconstitutional infringement upon First Amendment protections. Although the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has yet to deliver a definitive ruling on the constitutional challenge, legal observers widely anticipate that the ultimate decision will be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In the wake of New Jersey’s legislative action, at least 14 other states have enacted privacy laws closely modeled after Daniel’s Law, with several additional state legislatures weighing similar measures. However, the legal landscape remains volatile; a federal district court ruled West Virginia’s version of Daniel’s Law facially unconstitutional under the First Amendment.
Justin Sherman, a privacy researcher and author focusing on the mechanisms of the commercial data broker industry, noted that federal lawmakers have long encountered intense, well-funded lobbying campaigns waged by the technology sector against the enactment of comprehensive U.S. data privacy legislation. He emphasized that an array of powerful commercial interests—ranging from social media giants and cryptocurrency enterprises to proponents of artificial intelligence who argue that data scraping restrictions will severely impair economic growth—frequently oppose federal oversight.
Sherman argues that people-search platforms will inevitably continue to thrive unless and until Congress enacts meaningful, modernized consumer privacy and data protection standards tailored to the realities of the 21st century. This persistence is largely driven by the fact that virtually all state-level privacy frameworks explicitly exempt records categorized as public or government documents, including voting registries, property deeds, marriage licenses, motor vehicle files, criminal histories, court filings, death records, professional licenses, and bankruptcy declarations.
Although at least 25 states have implemented statutory requirements mandating age verification for residents accessing online adult content, no corresponding federal legislation regulates how third-party companies scanning government-issued identification cards are permitted to store, share, or utilize collected data. The absence of such regulatory safeguards was underscored by a major security incident involving IDScan.net, which exposed the driver’s license details of more than 153 million Americans after the sensitive records were briefly repurposed into an accessible point-and-click identity theft resource 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."
