Data Broker Radaris Loses Domains in Privacy Fight

Data Broker Radaris Loses Domains in Privacy Fight

Data Broker Radaris Loses Domains in Privacy Fight is not a headline the people-search industry expected to read. For years, Radaris.com ignored takedown requests, shuffled corporate identities across exotic jurisdictions, and outlasted plaintiffs who simply ran out of money and patience. That playbook collapsed in a New Jersey courtroom.

A judge ordered radaris.com and more than a dozen other data broker domains transferred to Atlas Data Privacy Corp, a company that has spent years suing firms accused of violating a state statute known as Daniel's Law. The statute lets law enforcement officials, government personnel, judges and their families demand complete removal of their personal information from commercial data brokers. Companies that ignore those requests face fines of $1,000 per violation.

How the Radaris Case Unfolded

Atlas sued Radaris in February 2024. Less than a month later, reporting surfaced on the Radaris co-founders: Igor and Dmitry Lubarsky, also spelled Lybarsky, Russian-born brothers living in Massachusetts who operate a sprawling collection of people-search companies alongside Russian language dating services and affiliate programs.

Attorneys for the brothers threatened a defamation suit unless the story was removed and an apology issued. Their lawyer claimed the reporting was wildly inaccurate and insisted the true owners were Ukrainians living in Ukraine. That claim did not hold. Follow-up reporting showed the brothers built and ran Radaris using a fictitious CEO named Gary Norden, a pseudonym their own attorney, Val Gurvits of the Boston Law Group, eventually admitted his clients had invented. Radaris had even issued press releases quoting the fake CEO while courting investors.

Then came the courtroom games. Radaris attorneys waited until the last possible minute to appear and contest what was nearly a default judgment, arguing Atlas had failed to serve the real owners and operators. Atlas re-filed in June 2025, expanding the number of Radaris family data brokers accused of violating Daniel's Law.

Island Hopping and Shell Games

Matt Adkisson, president and CEO of Atlas, described the strategy plainly. "We refer to this period as their island-hopping phase. Privacy policies changed constantly, and new entities kept appearing from places like the Marshall Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and Seychelles," he said. "Behind the scenes, it felt like a shell game."

Defense lawyers told the court something simple. Certain entities merely operated the domains. They're the proper parties to sue. But by the time a judgment neared, those entities would be discarded, tossed aside like old receipts, and new ones would appear, which meant the lawyers could keep arguing that the entities that actually owned the domains, the ones with real control and real responsibility, should not be held responsible.

Radaris updated its terms of service. The company said it was now managed by a Marshall Islands entity. So Atlas hired an investigator there. The brand new company that Radaris claimed was managing the operation, the one that was supposed to be running everything from that Marshall Islands address, did not even exist yet. It didn't exist.

A Decade of Winning by Attrition

This was not Radaris's first brush with a courtroom loss. In a 2017 class action, the company temporarily lost by default because it never contested the claim. When plaintiffs told the judge they could not collect on the $7.5 million judgment, the court ordered the domain registry Verisign to transfer radaris.com to them. Gurvits appealed, arguing the lawsuit had not named the actual domain owner, a Cyprus company called Bitseller Expert Limited, so seizing the domain would violate due process. The judge sided with Radaris and halted the transfer. The plaintiffs never re-filed.

Soon after, the operator of Radaris changed from Bitseller to Andtop Company, an entity formed in the Marshall Islands in October 2020.

"That seemed to be their modus operandi. In the past, they won by attrition. Plaintiffs' attorneys tired of the procedural games and just gave up."

That assessment came from Raj Parikh. He's a partner at PEM Law in New Jersey, and he handles most of the Daniel's Law litigation for Atlas. He added that the strategy worked for a decade and probably would have worked again, since recovering money from foreign actors is difficult. But Atlas was acutely aware of the threat the website posed to law enforcement officers and other public officials in New Jersey, and it committed whatever time and resources were necessary to remove it.

The Judge Runs Out of Patience

On August 26, the judge found the defendants had been given multiple chances to appear and defend the claims but failed to do so. Gurvits declined to comment, saying the case had been assigned to another attorney, Victor Worms.

Worms pushed back. He asserted the New Jersey court transferred radaris.com to Atlas as part of a default judgment against Radaris.com, which he said 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. "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."

Radaris.com still surfaces prominently in search results for U.S. residents by name, but the domain no longer sells detailed personal dossiers. Its homepage now displays a notice from Atlas about the court-ordered transfer. All told, the New Jersey court has transferred domain names from the Radaris family of companies to Atlas.

What the Emails Showed

Atlas says it obtained more than 10,000 emails and documents during litigation. Those messages, according to the company, confirm that the nominal legal vehicles behind the operation are all administered by the same three or four people from the same mailboxes, share one bank or payment card set, and are managed from one virtual office address.

The list of entities includes:

• Radaris America, Inc. and Bitseller Expert Limited
• Digital Orbit Corp and Core Solutions Group Inc
• Lucky Solutions Inc, Virtura Corp, and Veripages Inc.
• Nuform Solutions Inc., Growth Data Advisors Inc., and Property Experts, Inc.

Atlas says the records establish that radaris.com and at least twenty-five other people-search websites are one operation run by a small Boston-area group, with administrative, financial and technical functions sitting on the difive.com mail domain and its successors. The financial picture is equally specific.

The Road Ahead for Daniel's Law

Radaris still potentially faces fines of $1,000 per alleged violation. But Daniel's Law itself is under a constitutional challenge from virtually all of the 150 other consumer data broker firms Atlas is suing. The industry responded by having at least 70 of those lawsuits moved to federal court, arguing the New Jersey statute is overly broad and violates the First Amendment.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has not yet ruled, and either way the case is widely expected to reach the Supreme Court. At least 14 other states have passed laws modeled on the New Jersey statute, with more considering similar measures. West Virginia's version, however, was ruled facially unconstitutional under the First Amendment by a federal district court.

Justin Sherman, a privacy expert and author of the forthcoming book "The Middlemen," said federal lawmakers have long faced intense lobbying against restrictive data privacy laws. "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," he said.

Sherman argued people-search companies will keep thriving until Congress enacts meaningful consumer privacy and data protection laws. Nearly every state privacy law exempts records considered public or government documents, including voting registries, property filings, marriage certificates, motor vehicle records, criminal records, court documents, death records, professional licenses, and bankruptcy filings.

"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."