For years, the consumer data broker Radaris.com maintained a reputation for ignoring requests to remove personal information from its vast network of online people-search services. That operational model finally caught up with the company in a New Jersey courtroom, where a judge ordered that radaris.com and more than a dozen other data broker domains be transferred directly to the plaintiffs. The unprecedented ruling comes after years of stonewalling, shell games involving offshore entities, and aggressive legal maneuvers by the company’s operators.

The legal showdown began in February 2024, when Atlas Data Privacy Corp filed a lawsuit against Radaris. Atlas has aggressively pursued data brokers alleged to be violating a New Jersey privacy statute known as Daniel’s Law. Named in honor of a tragic family shooting involving the son of a federal judge, the statute allows state law enforcement officials, government personnel, judges, and their families to have their personal information completely scrubbed from commercial data brokers and people-search services. Crucially, the law provides for statutory fines of $1,000 per violation against companies that ignore legitimate removal requests.

Less than a month after the initial lawsuit was filed, investigative reporting by KrebsOnSecurity published a deep dive into the co-founders of Radaris: Igor and Dmitry Lubarsky, Russian-born brothers residing in Massachusetts. The reporting revealed that the brothers operate a dizzying array of people-search companies alongside a portfolio of Russian-language dating services and affiliate marketing programs. Attorneys for the Lubarsky brothers quickly threatened to sue for defamation if the story was not removed and a formal apology issued, asserting that the reporting was inaccurate and that the true owners were actually Ukrainians living in Ukraine.

In response, investigators doubled down, demonstrating how the Lubarsky brothers built and operated Radaris and other data broker companies using a fictitious CEO named "Gary Norden." Radaris’s attorney—Boston Law Group lawyer Val Gurvits—subsequently admitted that his clients had invented the CEO pseudonym. Furthermore, public records showed that Radaris had issued multiple press releases over the years quoting the fake executive while seeking capital from potential investors.

When the litigation progressed, attorneys for Radaris waited until the final moments to appear in court and contest what appeared to be a certain 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 to include a broader family of Radaris-affiliated data brokers accused of violating Daniel’s Law. Matt Adkisson, president and CEO of Atlas, noted that Radaris deployed a tried-and-true playbook characterized by court delays and corporate shell games regarding the true country of origin and registered owners 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 added 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 and quickly discovered that the brand-new entity did not even exist.

The tactics mirrored previous legal battles. Mr. Gurvits had previously represented Radaris in a 2017 class-action lawsuit that the company temporarily lost because it failed to mount a defense in court. When plaintiffs in that case informed the judge that they could not collect on a $7.5 million default judgment, the court ordered the 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 owners of the domain—a Cyprus-based company called Bitseller Expert Limited—and that transferring the domain would violate due process rights. The judge halted the transfer, and soon after, operations shifted from Bitseller to Andtop Company, an entity formed in the Marshall Islands in October 2020. The plaintiffs in that case never re-filed their complaint.

"That seemed to be their modus operandi," said Raj Parikh, a partner at PEM Law in New Jersey who handles most 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 in the New Jersey case ruled that the defendants were given multiple opportunities to appear and defend against the claims but failed to do so. Mr. Gurvits declined to comment on the ruling, noting that the case 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 he argued 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 said. " mobilité 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 the radaris.com domain still surfaces prominently in search engine results for U.S. residents, it no longer functions as a commercial broker of detailed personal dossiers. Its homepage now displays an official notice from Atlas detailing the court-ordered domain transfer.

Email Confirmations and Corporate Networks

During the course of the litigation, Atlas obtained more than 10,000 emails and internal documents. According to the plaintiffs, these messages substantiate prior reporting regarding the true owners and operators behind Radaris and its sprawling network of interconnected companies.

The documents reportedly establish 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 core group of individuals. The entities share mailboxes, banking arrangements, payment card processing sets, and operate out of 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 a summary prepared by Atlas.

According to Atlas, the internal emails indicate that Radaris.com generates approximately $42,000 a 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 operating brands such as PeopleLooker, PeopleSmart, NumberGuru, and Bumper.

Furthermore, the documents reveal that the Radaris family of websites earned up to $25,000 monthly from partnerships with Onerep, a privacy service that claims to help individuals remove their information from people-search sites. Previous investigations revealed that Onerep’s founder had launched and operated numerous people-search platforms over the years while simultaneously offering consumer removal services.

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

The Road Ahead

Although the Radaris network faces potential statutory fines of $1,000 per violation under Daniel’s Law, the broader enforcement mechanism is currently facing a sweeping constitutional challenge. Virtually all of the 150 consumer data broker firms targeted by Atlas lawsuits have mounted coordinated challenges in 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. Legal analysts anticipate that whichever way the appellate court rules, the case will ultimately be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, at least 14 other states have enacted legislation modeled after New Jersey’s statute, with several more considering similar frameworks. However, the legal landscape remains fractured. 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 the surveillance economy powered by data brokers, noted that federal lawmakers have long faced fierce lobbying against 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 thrive unless Congress enacts comprehensive federal consumer privacy and data protection legislation tailored to the digital age. Most existing 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 files, death records, professional licenses, and bankruptcy filings.

While at least 25 states have implemented laws requiring age verification for users accessing adult online content, no federal statute regulates how third-party companies scan, store, or share collected driver’s license data. Privacy advocates note that comprehensive restrictions could help prevent widespread data breaches, such as a recent incident involving IDScan.net that exposed the driver’s license records of 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."