The consumer data broker Radaris.com has long maintained a notorious reputation for ignoring consumer requests to remove personal information from its sprawling empire of online people-search services. That operational posture finally caught up with the company in a dramatic legal showdown. In a New Jersey lawsuit alleging that Radaris violated a strict state privacy law providing for hefty fines against data brokers that publish personal information on state law enforcement officials, a judge has ordered that Radaris.com and more than a dozen other data broker domains be transferred directly to the plaintiffs.
The enforcement action stems from a lawsuit filed in February 2024 by Atlas Data Privacy Corp, a company that has aggressively pursued data brokers alleged to be violating a New Jersey statute known as Daniel’s Law. Named in honor of a tragic family incident involving a federal judge, the statute allows state law enforcement officials, government personnel, judges, and their families to demand the complete removal of their personal information from commercial data brokers and people-search services. Furthermore, the statute provides for statutory fines of $1,000 per violation against companies that ignore or fail to act upon valid removal requests.
Less than a month after Atlas initiated its lawsuit against Radaris, investigative reporting from KrebsOnSecurity published a deep dive into the elusive co-founders of Radaris: Igor and Dmitry Lubarsky, also known as Lybarsky. The Russian-born brothers, who reside 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 investigative story was not immediately retracted and an apology issued. Their legal counsel asserted that the reporting was wildly inaccurate and claimed that the true owners of the enterprise were actually Ukrainian citizens living in Ukraine.
Undeterred, investigative journalists doubled down, publishing a subsequent report detailing how the Lubarsky brothers built and operated Radaris and a network of related data broker companies using a fictitious CEO named "Gary Norden." This follow-up revealed that Radaris’s attorney—Boston Law Group lawyer Val Gurvits—had openly admitted that his clients invented the CEO pseudonym. The company had even issued multiple press releases over the years quoting the fake executive while actively seeking capital from potential investors.
When the legal pressure mounted, attorneys for Radaris waited until the very last minute to appear in court and contest what appeared to be an inevitable default judgment in favor of the plaintiffs. During these proceedings, defense counsel argued that Atlas had failed to properly serve the real owners and operators of Radaris and its several sister data broker 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 violating Daniel’s Law. Matt Adkisson, president and CEO of Atlas, noted that Radaris deployed a familiar, time-tested playbook: delaying proceedings in court until the absolute last possible moment while playing an elaborate shell game regarding the true country of origin and the identities of the individuals managing the sites.
According to Adkisson, this period resembled an island-hopping phase characterized by constantly shifting privacy policies and a rotating cast of newly minted corporate entities appearing in distant offshore jurisdictions such as the Marshall Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and the Seychelles. Behind the scenes, defense attorneys repeatedly told the court that specific entities merely operated the domains and represented the proper parties to sue, only for those entities to be quietly discarded and replaced by new corporate shells as judgments neared. When defendants updated their terms of service to claim Radaris was suddenly managed by a Marshall Islands company, Atlas hired a local investigator and quickly discovered that the brand-new entity did not even exist.
This procedural strategy mirrored tactics used years earlier. Mr. Gurvits had previously stepped forward as Radaris’s attorney 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 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 to the plaintiffs.
Although Mr. Gurvits successfully appealed that verdict by arguing that the lawsuit had failed to name the actual owner of the domain—a Cyprus-registered company called Bitseller Expert Limited—the temporary victory halted the transfer. Soon after, the operational control of Radaris shifted from Bitseller to Andtop Company, an entity formed in the Marshall Islands in October 2020, and the plaintiffs ultimately never re-filed their complaint.
Raj Parikh, a partner at PEM Law in New Jersey who handles the bulk of Daniel’s Law litigation for Atlas, noted that winning through sheer attrition had long been the company’s modus operandi. Plaintiffs’ attorneys would historically grow tired of endless procedural games and simply abandon their efforts. While recovering financial assets from foreign actors remains notoriously difficult, Atlas recognized the severe safety threat the website posed to law enforcement officers and public officials in New Jersey, committing whatever time and resources were necessary to neutralize it.
On August 26, the presiding judge in the New Jersey case ruled that the defendants had been granted multiple opportunities to appear and defend against the claims but had repeatedly failed to do so. Mr. Gurvits declined to comment on the recent ruling, indicating that the matter had been reassigned to another attorney, Victor Worms. In response to inquiries, Mr. Worms asserted that the New Jersey court erred by transferring Radaris.com to Atlas as part of a default judgment against Radaris.com, which he argued is not a legal entity with the capacity to sue or be sued.
Worms stated that the defense has filed a motion to vacate the default judgment on those grounds and intends to pursue all appropriate appeals, maintaining that the domain transfer amounts to an unconstitutional forfeiture.
While radaris.com still appears prominently in search engine results when individuals look up U.S. residents by name, the domain no longer functions as a commercial storefront selling detailed personal dossiers on millions of Americans. Its homepage now prominently displays a formal notice from Atlas detailing the court-ordered domain transfer, alongside links to prior investigative reporting on the network.
Email Confirmations and Corporate Networks
During the course of the litigation, Atlas reportedly secured more than 10,000 internal emails and corporate documents. According to the plaintiffs, these records substantiate previous investigative findings regarding the true ownership and administrative structure of Radaris and its extensive network of subsidiary companies.
The communications allegedly demonstrate 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 administered by the same small group of individuals using shared mailboxes, a unified set of banking and payment card channels, and a single virtual office address.
A summary shared by Atlas indicates that these documents, generated independently by banks, payment processors, hosting providers, registrars, and SaaS vendors, confirm that radaris.com and at least 25 other people-search websites constitute a single unified operation. This operation is managed by a Boston-area group relying on administrative, financial, and technical infrastructure routed through the difive.com mail domain and its historical successors, such as centerex.com, scienteco.com, eprofit.com, realmo.com, and pub360.com.
Financial records uncovered in the litigation suggest that Radaris.com generates approximately $42,000 per month, while a sister site, Veripages.com, brings in roughly $45,000 monthly through partnerships with the Lifetime Value Company, a marketing and advertising firm operating consumer brands such as PeopleLooker, PeopleSmart, NumberGuru, and the vehicle history site Bumper.
Furthermore, Atlas reported that the Radaris family of websites earns up to $25,000 monthly through partnerships with Onerep, a privacy service that claims to assist individuals in removing their personal information from people-search directories. Previous investigative reporting revealed that Onerep’s founder had launched and operated numerous people-search websites over the years, effectively participating in the data broker ecosystem while simultaneously marketing removal services to consumers.
To date, the New Jersey court has ordered the transfer of 14 domain names from the Radaris network to Atlas.
The Road Ahead
While the Radaris corporate network faces potential statutory fines of $1,000 per violation under Daniel’s Law, the broader legal framework of the statute is currently facing a sweeping constitutional challenge. Virtually all of the approximately 150 consumer data broker firms targeted in lawsuits by Atlas have joined forces to challenge the New Jersey law.
The data broker industry has successfully moved at least 70 of these lawsuits into federal court, arguing that the New Jersey statute is overly broad and infringes upon First Amendment protections. Although the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has yet to issue a definitive ruling on the constitutional challenge, legal analysts widely expect the ultimate outcome to 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 state legislatures considering similar measures. However, the legal landscape remains fragmented; 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 the data broker industry fuels modern surveillance, noted that federal lawmakers have consistently faced intense lobbying from the technology sector against restrictive data privacy legislation. According to Sherman, opposition now extends beyond traditional tech firms to include social media giants, cryptocurrency enterprises, and artificial intelligence proponents who argue that limiting data scraping will cripple the economy.
Sherman emphasized that people-search companies will continue to thrive unless Congress enacts meaningful federal consumer privacy and data protection laws tailored to the digital age. Most existing state privacy laws 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.
Although at least 25 states have implemented laws requiring age verification for residents accessing online adult content, no federal legislation regulates how companies handling scanned driver’s licenses can use, share, or store collected data. Observers note that comprehensive federal safeguards might have prevented recent high-profile security incidents, such as the breach at IDScan.net that exposed driver’s license information for more than 153 million Americans.
Sherman concluded that while the public reaction to Daniel’s Law is generally supportive of privacy protections for all citizens rather than just public officials, the ongoing lack of federal action persists despite repeated warnings and high-profile data exposures.
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