The consumer data broker Radaris.com has long maintained a stubborn reputation for ignoring requests to remove personal information from its vast network of online people-search services. That operational impunity finally caught up with the enterprise in a New Jersey court, where a judge ordered the transfer of radaris.com and more than a dozen related data broker domains directly to plaintiffs following persistent stonewalling and evasive legal tactics.
The punitive transfer stems from a lawsuit filed in February 2024 by Atlas Data Privacy Corp, an organization actively pursuing data brokers accused of violating a strict New Jersey statute known as Daniel’s Law. The legislation was enacted to protect state law enforcement officials, government personnel, judges, and their families by compelling commercial data brokers and people-search services to completely scrub their personal records. The statute carries steep financial penalties, providing for fines of $1,000 per violation against companies that ignore removal requests.
Less than a month after Atlas initiated its legal action, independent security journalism detailed the background of Radaris’s co-founders: Igor and Dmitry Lubarsky, Russian-born brothers residing in Massachusetts who operate a sprawling ecosystem of people-search companies alongside various Russian-language dating services and affiliate programs. Attorneys representing the Lubarsky brothers quickly threatened to sue for defamation if the investigative reporting was not retracted and an apology issued, asserting that the reporting was inaccurate and that the true owners were actually Ukrainian nationals living in Ukraine.
Subsequent investigations further demonstrated how the Lubarsky brothers constructed and maintained Radaris and sister entities using a fictitious CEO named "Gary Norden." Radaris’s legal counsel, Boston Law Group attorney Val Gurvits, eventually admitted that his clients had fabricated the executive pseudonym. Records showed Radaris had issued multiple historical press releases featuring quotes from the fake CEO while actively soliciting capital from potential investors.
When legal pressure mounted, attorneys for Radaris waited until the last possible moment to contest what appeared to be an inevitable default judgment, arguing before the court that Atlas had failed to properly serve the true owners and operators of the network. In response, Atlas refiled 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 violating Daniel’s Law.
Matt Adkisson, president and CEO of Atlas, noted that the defendants relied on a familiar playbook of courtroom delays and shell games regarding the true country of origin and the individuals listed as corporate owners. Adkisson described this tactical phase as "island-hopping," pointing to constantly shifting privacy policies and newly appearing entities incorporated in offshore jurisdictions such as the Marshall Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and Seychelles.
Behind the scenes, Adkisson explained, defense lawyers argued that specific entities merely operated the domains and represented the proper parties to sue, only for those entities to be discarded right as judgments approached while brand-new corporate structures materialized in their place. When the defendants updated their terms of service to claim that Radaris was suddenly managed by a Marshall Islands entity, Atlas hired local investigators who discovered that the newly cited management company did not even exist.
This procedural strategy mirrors past litigation, including a 2017 class action lawsuit that Radaris temporarily lost because it failed to contest the claims in court. When plaintiffs in that case reported they could not collect on a $7.5 million default judgment, the court ordered domain registry Verisign to transfer radaris.com to the plaintiffs. Although that transfer was eventually halted after Gurvits appealed on behalf of a Cyprus-registered company named Bitseller Expert Limited—arguing a violation of due process rights—the operational structure quickly shifted again to an entity formed in the Marshall Islands in October 2020 known as Andtop Company.
Raj Parikh, a partner at PEM Law in New Jersey who handles the bulk of Daniel’s Law litigation for Atlas, noted that attrition had long been the company’s primary defense strategy. For a decade, plaintiffs’ attorneys often tired of procedural games and abandoned their claims, a tactic that successfully shielded the operators because financial recoveries from foreign actors remain exceptionally difficult. However, recognizing the direct threat these directory listings posed to law enforcement officers and public officials in New Jersey, Atlas committed the necessary time and resources to see the litigation through.
By late August, the judge in the New Jersey case ruled that the defendants had been granted ample opportunities to appear and defend themselves but willfully failed to do so. While Val Gurvits declined to comment on the ruling and deferred inquiries to another attorney, Victor Worms, Worms asserted that the court erred by transferring the domain based on a default judgment against Radaris.com, arguing that a non-corporate entity lacks the legal capacity to be sued. Worms indicated that defense counsel filed a motion to vacate the default judgment and intended to pursue all appropriate appeals, maintaining that the domain transfer constitutes an unconstitutional forfeiture.
Today, while radaris.com still appears prominently in search engine results for U.S. residents, the domain no longer functions as a commercial directory selling detailed dossiers on millions of Americans. Its homepage now redirects visitors to an official notice issued by Atlas detailing the court-ordered transfer.
Email Confirmations and Corporate Networks
During the course of the litigation, Atlas reportedly secured more than 10,000 internal emails and corporate documents that substantiate previous investigative findings regarding the ownership and operation of Radaris and its extensive collection of subsidiary companies. According to Atlas, the documentary evidence confirms 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 the same core group of individuals. These entities share unified banking and payment card channels and are managed from a single virtual office address.
The gathered documentation establishes that radaris.com and at least twenty-five other people-search properties operate as a unified enterprise controlled by a small Boston-area team utilizing shared administrative, financial, and technical infrastructure centered around specific mail domains like difive.com and its successors, including centerex.com, scienteco.com, eprofit.com, realmo.com, and pub360.com.
Financial records analyzed by Atlas indicate that Radaris.com generates approximately $42,000 per month, while a sister site, Veripages.com, brings in roughly $45,000 monthly through commercial partnerships with the Lifetime Value Company, an advertising and marketing firm operating brands such as PeopleLooker, PeopleSmart, NumberGuru, and the vehicle history site Bumper. Additionally, the internal records show that the Radaris web network earns up to $25,000 monthly through partnerships with Onerep, a privacy service that claims to help individuals scrub their personal information from people-search directories. Previous investigative reporting revealed that Onerep’s Belarusian founder launched and operated numerous people-search directories over the years, effectively participating in both sides of the data exposure ecosystem.
To date, the New Jersey court has transferred 14 domain names belonging to the Radaris network to Atlas.
The Road Ahead
Despite these enforcement victories, the broader legal battle surrounding Daniel’s Law remains intensely contested. The Radaris network still faces potential statutory fines of $1,000 per alleged violation, but the wider data broker industry has mounted a unified constitutional challenge against the legislation. More than 150 consumer data broker firms currently sued by Atlas have pushed back, with at least 70 of those lawsuits moved to federal court on the grounds that the New Jersey statute is overly broad and violates First Amendment protections.
While the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has not yet issued a final ruling on the constitutional challenge, legal observers anticipate the dispute will ultimately reach the U.S. Supreme Court. At the same time, at least 14 other states have enacted privacy laws modeled directly after New Jersey’s legislation, and several other states are weighing similar measures. However, judicial resistance has emerged elsewhere; in August 2025, a federal district court ruled West Virginia’s version of Daniel’s Law facially unconstitutional under the First Amendment.
Justin Sherman, a privacy expert and author of the forthcoming book "The Middlemen," which examines how data brokers power modern surveillance, noted that federal lawmakers have long faced intense lobbying from the technology sector against restrictive data privacy regulations. Today, that opposition includes broad coalitions of social media platforms, big tech enterprises, cryptocurrency firms, and artificial intelligence proponents who argue that limiting data scraping harms broader economic interests.
Sherman emphasized that people-search companies will continue to thrive unless Congress enacts comprehensive consumer privacy and data protection laws appropriate for the modern digital era. Most state-level privacy frameworks routinely exempt records categorized as public or government documents, including voting registries, property filings, marriage certificates, motor vehicle records, criminal histories, court files, death records, professional licenses, and bankruptcy filings.
Although at least 25 states have implemented laws requiring age verification for residents accessing adult online content, no federal statute regulates how third-party companies scanning driver’s licenses may use, share, or retain the collected data. The absence of such restrictions was starkly underscored by a recent security breach at IDScan.net, which exposed driver’s license records belonging to more than 153 million Americans when the data was temporarily converted into a point-and-click 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."
