The consumer data broker Radaris.com has long been a notorious player in the online people-search industry, consistently disregarding requests to remove personal information from its vast databases. This persistent disregard for privacy led to a significant legal battle, culminating in a lawsuit alleging Radaris violated a New Jersey privacy law designed to protect state law enforcement officials. After repeated evasions and delays from Radaris’s legal representatives, a judge ordered the transfer of radaris.com and over a dozen other data broker domains to the plaintiffs.

This pivotal legal action was initiated in February 2024 by Atlas Data Privacy Corp, a company actively pursuing data brokers accused of violating New Jersey’s Daniel’s Law. This statute empowers state law enforcement, government personnel, judges, and their families to have their personal information scrubbed from commercial data broker and people-search services, imposing substantial fines of $1,000 per violation for non-compliance.

Less than a month after Atlas filed suit against Radaris, KrebsOnSecurity published an in-depth exposé on the company’s co-founders, Russian-born brothers Igor and Dmitry Lubarsky, who reside in Massachusetts. These brothers operate a complex network of people-search companies, alongside Russian-language dating services and affiliate marketing programs. In response, the Lubarsky brothers’ attorneys threatened defamation lawsuits, demanding the article’s removal and a public apology, while falsely claiming the reporting was inaccurate and that the true owners were Ukrainians.

KrebsOnSecurity stood by its reporting, further detailing how the Lubarsky brothers managed Radaris and other data broker operations using a fabricated CEO named "Gary Norden." Their legal counsel, Val Gurvits of the Boston Law Group, eventually admitted to the use of this pseudonym and acknowledged that Radaris had issued press releases quoting the fictitious CEO to solicit investments.

Attorneys for Radaris attempted to delay a default judgment by appearing at the last minute in court, arguing that Atlas had failed to serve the actual owners and operators of Radaris and its affiliated companies. Undeterred, Atlas refiled the lawsuit in June 2025, significantly expanding the list of Radaris-related data brokers accused of violating Daniel’s Law. Matt Adkisson, President and CEO of Atlas, described Radaris’s strategy as a calculated effort to evade accountability through constant legal maneuvering, shifting corporate structures, and obfuscation of their true origins and ownership. Adkisson characterized this period as an "island-hopping phase," where privacy policies were frequently altered, and new entities emerged from offshore jurisdictions like the Marshall Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and Seychelles. He elaborated, "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."

Atlas further investigated when Radaris updated its terms of service to claim management by a Marshall Islands-based company. An investigator hired by Atlas discovered that this newly formed entity did not, in fact, exist.

The history of legal challenges against Radaris dates back to a 2017 class-action lawsuit, where the company faced a default judgment of $7.5 million for failing to contest the claims. At that time, the court ordered Verisign to transfer the radaris.com domain to the plaintiffs. However, Mr. Gurvits successfully appealed this decision, arguing that the lawsuit had not named the actual owner of the domain, a Cyprus-based company called Bitseller Expert Limited, and that transferring the domain would violate their due process rights. The judge sided with Radaris, halting the domain transfer and allowing the plaintiffs to refile. Subsequently, the operator of Radaris shifted from Bitseller to Andtop Company, an entity incorporated in the Marshall Islands in October 2020. The plaintiffs did not pursue refiling.

Raj Parikh, a partner at PEM Law in New Jersey and lead counsel for Atlas in Daniel’s Law litigation, noted that this pattern of delay and procedural gamesmanship had historically allowed companies like Radaris to evade accountability through attrition, as plaintiffs’ attorneys often grew weary of the protracted legal battles. "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," Parikh stated. "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 New Jersey judge ruled that the defendants had ample opportunities to defend themselves but failed to do so. Mr. Gurvits, who stated the case had been reassigned, declined to comment. His successor, Mr. Victor Worms, asserted that the court transferred radaris.com as part of a default judgment against Radaris.com, which he claims 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 in online searches for U.S. residents, it no longer offers detailed personal dossiers. The homepage now features a notice from Atlas and links to KrebsOnSecurity’s prior reporting on Radaris.

Atlas has reportedly secured over 10,000 emails and documents through the litigation, which they claim corroborate KrebsOnSecurity’s findings regarding the ownership and operation of Radaris and its associated companies. According to Atlas, these communications reveal that nominal legal entities such as 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 managed by a small group of individuals sharing common mailboxes, payment systems, and virtual office addresses.

"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 (centerex.com, scienteco.com, eprofit.com, realmo.com, pub360.com)," an Atlas summary stated.

Atlas further reported 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, which operates brands like PeopleLooker, PeopleSmart, NumberGuru, and Bumper. Additionally, the Radaris family of websites reportedly earns up to $25,000 monthly from their collaboration with Onerep, a company that claims to assist individuals in removing their data from people-search sites. This partnership highlights a concerning irony, given that KrebsOnSecurity previously revealed the Belarusian founder of Onerep had established and operated numerous people-search sites, including Nuwber, thereby perpetuating the very problem Onerep purports to solve.

The New Jersey court has so far ordered the transfer of 14 domain names from the Radaris group to Atlas. Radaris.com now serves as a redirection page to a notice detailing the court-ordered domain transfer.

The Radaris companies still face potential fines of $1,000 per alleged violation of Daniel’s Law. However, the broader legal landscape for such privacy statutes is complex, as Daniel’s Law is currently facing a constitutional challenge from approximately 150 other consumer data broker firms being sued by Atlas. The data broker industry has succeeded in moving at least 70 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 constitutional challenge, and it is widely anticipated that the case will proceed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

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

Privacy expert Justin Sherman, author of the forthcoming book "The Middlemen," which examines the data broker industry’s role in modern surveillance, notes that federal lawmakers have long encountered intense lobbying from the technology sector against more stringent U.S. data privacy laws. He observes that powerful industries, including social media companies, big tech, cryptocurrency firms, and now AI proponents, are actively opposing comprehensive data privacy legislation, often arguing that data scraping limitations would cripple the U.S. economy.

Sherman posits that people-search companies will continue to thrive unless Congress enacts meaningful consumer privacy and data protection laws relevant to the 21st century. He points out that most state privacy laws exempt records considered "public" or "government" documents, such as voting registries, property filings, marriage certificates, motor vehicle records, criminal records, court documents, death records, professional licenses, and bankruptcy filings.

Despite at least 25 states having laws requiring age verification for access to adult content, there is no federal law regulating how companies that collect driver’s license information can use, share, or retain such data. Sherman suggests that the absence of such federal restrictions could have contributed to recent data breaches, such as the one at IDScan.net, which exposed the driver’s license information of over 153 million Americans, subsequently appearing on the dark web as an identity theft service.

"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 commented. "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."