In a significant legal victory for consumer privacy advocates, the data broker Radaris.com has seen more than a dozen of its domains, including its flagship website, transferred to plaintiffs in a lawsuit alleging violations of New Jersey’s Daniel’s Law. This landmark decision stems from Radaris’s persistent refusal to honor removal requests for personal information, particularly concerning state law enforcement officials and their families, a practice that has long defined its reputation in the murky world of people-search services.

The legal battle began in February 2024 when Atlas Data Privacy Corp. filed a lawsuit against Radaris. Atlas, a company dedicated to pursuing data brokers that flout privacy statutes, leveraged Daniel’s Law, a New Jersey statute designed to shield law enforcement, government personnel, judges, and their families from the public dissemination of their personal data. The law mandates the complete removal of such information from commercial data brokers and imposes hefty fines of $1,000 per violation for non-compliance.

This development follows a series of investigative reports by KrebsOnSecurity, which had previously delved into the operations of Radaris and its co-founders, Russian-born brothers Igor and Dmitry Lubarsky. These reports highlighted their extensive network of people-search companies and Russian language dating services. The Lubarsky brothers’ legal team initially responded to these reports with threats of defamation lawsuits, asserting inaccuracies and falsely claiming the true owners were Ukrainian. However, subsequent investigations by KrebsOnSecurity, aided by information from Atlas, revealed the brothers’ use of a fictitious CEO, "Gary Norden," to front their operations and solicit investments, a pseudonym that their own attorney, Val Gurvits of the Boston Law Group, eventually admitted to.

Radaris’s legal strategy was characterized by repeated delays and obfuscation. Attorneys for the company consistently failed to appear in court promptly, often presenting their arguments at the last possible moment. They frequently employed tactics of misdirection, claiming that Atlas had not served the true owners of Radaris and its affiliated data broker companies, leading to a protracted legal chess match.

In a significant expansion of the case in June 2025, Atlas re-filed the lawsuit, substantially increasing the number of Radaris-affiliated data brokers accused of violating Daniel’s Law. Matt Adkisson, president and CEO of Atlas, described Radaris’s approach as a "tried-and-true playbook" involving prolonged legal maneuvering and a deliberate obfuscation of their true origin and ownership. Adkisson referred to this period as their "island-hopping phase," during which privacy policies were constantly altered, and new corporate entities emerged from jurisdictions like the Marshall Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and Seychelles. He characterized the defense’s strategy as a "shell game," where entities responsible for operating domains would be discarded just as judgments loomed, only to be replaced by new entities that the defense would claim were not the proper parties to sue.

Atlas’s persistence paid off when they hired an investigator in the Marshall Islands, only to discover that a newly formed entity claimed by Radaris to be managing the company did not even exist. This revelation underscored the depth of the deception employed by Radaris.

The current legal victory echoes a previous class-action lawsuit in 2017 where Radaris temporarily lost a $7.5 million default judgment. At that time, the court ordered the domain registry Verisign to transfer radaris.com to the plaintiffs. However, Radaris’s attorney, Mr. Gurvits, successfully appealed this decision by arguing that the lawsuit had not named the actual domain owner, a Cyprus-based company called Bitseller Expert Limited, thus violating their due process rights. The judge halted the domain transfer, allowing the plaintiffs to refile their complaint. Subsequently, Radaris’s operator shifted from Bitseller to Andtop Company, an entity formed in the Marshall Islands in October 2020, a move that effectively stalled the plaintiffs’ renewed efforts.

Raj Parikh, a partner at PEM Law in New Jersey, who represents Atlas in Daniel’s Law litigation, explained that Radaris had historically won by attrition, exhausting plaintiffs’ attorneys with procedural games. This strategy had proven successful for a decade. However, recognizing the significant threat Radaris posed to New Jersey law enforcement and public officials, Atlas committed the necessary resources to dismantle this threat.

On August 26, the New Jersey court found that the defendants had been afforded multiple opportunities to defend themselves but had failed to do so. Mr. Gurvits declined to comment, stating the case had been reassigned to Mr. Victor Worms. Mr. Worms, however, asserted that the transfer of Radaris.com was part of a default judgment against Radaris.com, which he argued is not a legal entity, and therefore void. He indicated an intention to appeal the decision, viewing the domain transfer as an unconstitutional forfeiture.

While Radaris.com still appears in online searches for U.S. residents, it no longer offers detailed personal dossiers. The homepage now displays a notice from Atlas, along with links to previous KrebsOnSecurity reporting on Radaris.

Atlas has revealed that it has acquired over 10,000 emails and documents during the litigation, which they claim corroborate KrebsOnSecurity’s findings regarding the operators of Radaris and its associated companies. These documents reportedly show that nominal legal entities such as Radaris America, Inc., Bitseller Expert Limited, Digital Orbit Corp, and others are all managed by a small group of individuals operating from identical mailboxes, utilizing a shared banking or payment card set, and working from a single virtual office address.

The collected evidence suggests that the Radaris network of websites operates as a single entity, with administrative, financial, and technical functions routed through a common mail domain and its successors. Atlas’s summary indicates that Radaris.com generates approximately $42,000 per month, while Veripages.com earns around $45,000 monthly through a partnership with the Lifetime Value Company, a firm associated with brands like PeopleLooker and PeopleSmart. Furthermore, the Radaris family of websites reportedly earns up to $25,000 monthly from a partnership with Onerep, a company that, ironically, claims to help individuals remove their data from people-search sites. This partnership highlights a concerning trend where companies offering data removal services are themselves entangled with the very data brokers they aim to combat.

In total, the New Jersey court has transferred 14 domain names from the Radaris group to Atlas. The primary domain, radaris.com, now serves as a redirect, informing visitors about the court-ordered domain transfer.

Looking ahead, the Radaris companies still face potential fines of $1,000 per violation of Daniel’s Law. However, the broader landscape of privacy law is also in flux, with Daniel’s Law facing constitutional challenges from approximately 150 other consumer data broker firms being sued by Atlas. The data broker industry has responded by attempting to move many of these lawsuits to federal court, arguing that the New Jersey statute is overly broad and infringes upon First Amendment rights. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has yet to rule on this challenge, and the case is widely anticipated to reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

Adding to the complexity, at least 14 other states have enacted laws similar to Daniel’s Law, with more considering such measures. However, a federal district court in August 2025 ruled West Virginia’s version of Daniel’s Law facially unconstitutional under the First Amendment.

Privacy expert Justin Sherman, author of the forthcoming book "The Middlemen," observes that powerful industries, including social media, big tech, cryptocurrency, and even AI proponents, are actively lobbying against comprehensive data privacy legislation at the federal level. These entities often claim that restricting data scraping would cripple the U.S. economy. Sherman argues that people-search companies will continue to flourish unless Congress enacts meaningful, 21st-century privacy laws. He points out that most state privacy laws exempt records considered "public" or "government" documents, such as voting registries, property filings, and criminal records, thereby leaving significant loopholes.

Sherman also highlights the alarming lack of federal law governing the use and sharing of data collected through age verification systems, despite at least 25 states having such laws. He draws a parallel to the recent breach at IDScan.net, which exposed the driver’s license information of over 153 million Americans, underscoring the dire need for robust data protection measures.

"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 stated. "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." The Radaris domain seizure represents a significant step, but the fight for comprehensive data privacy continues.