The consumer data broker Radaris.com has long operated with a reputation for ignoring requests to remove personal information from its vast network of online people-search services. That operational model recently caught up with the company in a high-stakes New Jersey lawsuit alleging that Radaris violated state privacy legislation providing for hefty financial penalties against data brokers that publish personal information belonging to state law enforcement officials. Facing repeated stonewalling and procedural prevarication by attorneys representing Radaris, the presiding judge ordered that radaris.com and more than a dozen other data broker domains be transferred directly to the plaintiffs.

The legal showdown began in February 2024, when Radaris was sued by Atlas Data Privacy Corp, a firm that has aggressively pursued data brokers alleged to be violating a New Jersey statute known as Daniel’s Law. The statute allows state law enforcement officials, government personnel, judges, and their families to have their personal information completely removed from commercial data brokers and people-search services. Furthermore, it establishes statutory fines of $1,000 per violation against companies that ignore legitimate removal requests.

Less than a month after Atlas filed its lawsuit, investigative reporting shed light on the Radaris co-founders—Igor and Dmitry Lubarsky, also known as Lybarsky. The Russian-born brothers, living in Massachusetts, operate a dizzying array of people-search companies alongside a number of Russian-language dating services and affiliate marketing programs.

Attorneys representing the Lubarsky brothers quickly threatened to file a defamation lawsuit if the story was not retracted and an apology issued. Their legal representation asserted that the reporting was wildly inaccurate and claimed that the true owners of the enterprise were instead Ukrainians living in Ukraine.

Subsequent investigative follow-ups demonstrated how the Lubarsky brothers built and operated Radaris and other data broker companies using a fictitious CEO’s name. Radaris’s attorney, Val Gurvits of the Boston Law Group, later admitted that his clients had invented the CEO pseudonym "Gary Norden" and that Radaris had issued multiple press releases over the years quoting the fake executive while seeking capital from potential investors.

Attorneys for Radaris waited until the final moment to appear in court and contest what was nearly certain to be a default judgment in favor of the plaintiffs, arguing that Atlas had failed to properly serve the actual owners and operators of Radaris and several associated sister companies.

Atlas re-filed the lawsuit in June 2025, dramatically expanding the number of Radaris-affiliated data brokers accused of violating Daniel’s Law. Matt Adkisson, president and CEO of Atlas, stated that Radaris relied on a tried-and-true playbook of courtroom delays and corporate 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 claim Radaris was suddenly managed by a company in the Marshall Islands, Atlas hired a local investigator and quickly discovered that the brand-new entity did not even exist yet.

Mr. Gurvits had previously stepped forward as Radaris’s attorney in a class-action lawsuit the company temporarily lost in 2017 because it never contested the claims in court. When those plaintiffs informed the judge they could not collect on a $7.5 million default judgment, the court ordered domain registry Verisign to transfer the radaris.com domain name to the plaintiffs.

Mr. Gurvits appealed that verdict, arguing that the lawsuit had failed to name the actual owners of the Radaris domain name—a Cyprus company called Bitseller Expert Limited—and that stripping away the domain would violate due process rights. The judge in that 2017 case ultimately ruled in Radaris’s favor, halting the domain transfer and advising plaintiffs to refile. Shortly afterward, the operator of Radaris shifted from Bitseller to Andtop Company, an entity formed in the Marshall Islands in October 2020. The plaintiffs never refiled their lawsuit at that time.

"That seemed to be their modus operandi," said Raj Parikh, a partner at PEM Law in New Jersey who handles the bulk of 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 in the New Jersey case found that the defendants had been given multiple opportunities to appear and defend against the claims but had repeatedly failed to do so. Mr. Gurvits declined to comment on the recent developments, 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 against Radaris.com, which is not a 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 radaris.com still appears prominently in online search results for U.S. residents, the domain no longer sells detailed personal dossiers on millions of Americans. Its homepage now displays an official notice from Atlas, alongside links to prior investigative reporting detailing the platform’s operations.

Email Confirmations and Corporate Networks

Atlas reported that it has obtained more than 10,000 emails and internal documents over the course of the litigation, which corroborate previous findings regarding the owners and operators of Radaris and its sprawling network of front companies.

According to Atlas, the correspondence establishes that nominal legal entities—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 same small group of individuals using identical mailboxes, sharing centralized banking or payment card setups, and managed 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 shared by Atlas.

Data compiled from the emails indicates that Radaris.com generates approximately $42,000 a month, while Veripages.com earns around $45,000 monthly through partnerships with the Lifetime Value Company, a marketing and advertising firm operating brands such as PeopleLooker, PeopleSmart, NumberGuru, and Bumper.

Furthermore, Atlas stated that the emails revealed the Radaris family of websites earns up to $25,000 monthly through partnerships with Onerep, a company that markets itself as a privacy service helping individuals remove their personal data from people-search sites. Previous reporting uncovered how Onerep’s founder had launched and operated dozens of people-search sites over the years, maintaining control over properties like Nuwber while simultaneously selling removal services.

To date, the New Jersey court has transferred 14 domain names belonging to the Radaris network of companies to Atlas.

The Road Ahead for Digital Privacy

The Radaris network still faces potential fines of $1,000 per alleged violation of Daniel’s Law. For now, however, Daniel’s Law itself is confronting broad constitutional challenges brought by roughly 150 other consumer data broker firms that are also being sued by Atlas.

The data broker industry has responded by pushing at least 70 of the Atlas lawsuits into federal court, arguing that the New Jersey statute is overly broad and infringes upon 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 the case will ultimately reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, at least 14 other states have enacted legislation modeled after New Jersey’s Daniel’s Law, with additional states considering comparable 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 expert and author of the forthcoming book "The Middlemen," which examines how the data broker industry drives modern surveillance, noted that federal lawmakers have long faced intense lobbying by the technology sector against restrictive data privacy laws.

"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 thrive unless Congress enacts comprehensive consumer privacy and data protection legislation suited for the 21st century. Most state privacy laws explicitly exempt records classified as public or government documents, including 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 users accessing adult content online, no federal statute regulates how companies scanning driver’s licenses can use, share, or retain collected data. The absence of such restrictions recently enabled a major breach at IDScan.net, exposing 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."