Radaris loses grip on its domains

For years, Radaris.com sat near the top of search results for anyone hunting down a name, an address, or a phone number. That empire has now been dealt a serious blow: a New Jersey judge has ordered that radaris.com and more than a dozen other data broker domains be transferred to the plaintiffs in a privacy lawsuit.

The transfer is the culmination of a case brought by Atlas Data Privacy Corp, a company that has been pursuing data brokers alleged to be violating a New Jersey statute called Daniel's Law. The statute allows state law enforcement officials, government personnel, judges and their families to have their information completely removed from commercial data brokers and people-search services, and it provides for fines of $1,000 per violation against companies that ignore removal requests.

Atlas sued Radaris in February 2024. Less than a month later, KrebsOnSecurity published a deep dive into the Radaris co-founders — Igor and Dmitry Lubarsky (also spelled Lybarsky) — Russian-born brothers living in Massachusetts who operate a dizzying array of people-search companies as well as a number of Russian language dating services and affiliate programs.

Stonewalling and prevarication

Attorneys for Radaris waited until the last minute to appear in court and contest what was all but certain to be a default judgment in favor of the plaintiffs, and then told the court that Atlas had failed to serve the real owners and operators of Radaris and several of its sister data broker companies.

Atlas re-filed the lawsuit in June 2025, this time dramatically expanding the number of Radaris family data brokers accused of violating Daniel's Law. Matt Adkisson, president and CEO of Atlas, said Radaris turned to a tried-and-true playbook: Delaying in court until the last possible minute, and playing shell games with Radaris's true country of origin and the individuals listed as owners and operators of these sites.

"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," Adkisson told KrebsOnSecurity. "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."

— Matt Adkisson, president and CEO of Atlas Data Privacy Corp

Adkisson said when the defendants updated their terms of service to state that Radaris was suddenly managed by a company in the Marshall Islands, Atlas hired an investigator in that country and soon learned the brand new entity that Radaris claimed was managing the company didn't even exist yet.

A decade of winning by attrition

The procedural maneuvering has a long history. Radaris's attorney — a lawyer with the Boston Law Group named Val Gurvits — stepped forward as Radaris's attorney in a class action lawsuit the company temporarily lost in 2017 because it never contested the claim in court. When the plaintiffs told the judge they couldn't collect on the $7.5 million default judgment, the court ordered the domain registry Verisign to transfer the radaris.com domain name to the plaintiffs.

Gurvits appealed that verdict, arguing the lawsuit hadn't named the actual owners of the Radaris domain name — a Cyprus company called Bitseller Expert Limited — and thus taking the domain away would be a violation of their due process rights.

The judge in the 2017 case ruled in Radaris's favor — halting the domain transfer — and told the plaintiffs they could refile their complaint. Soon after, the operator of Radaris changed from Bitseller to Andtop Company, an entity formed in the Marshall Islands in Oct. 2020. The plaintiffs never re-filed their lawsuit.

"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."

— Raj Parikh, a partner at PEM Law in New Jersey

The judge's August 26 order

On August 26, the judge in the New Jersey case found the defendants were given multiple chances to appear and defend the claims against them but had failed to do so. Gurvits declined to comment on the case, saying it had been assigned to another attorney, a Mr. Victor Worms.

In response to questions, Worms asserted the New Jersey court transferred Radaris.com to Atlas as part of a default judgment against Radaris.com, which 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 replied. "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."

— Victor Worms, attorney for Radaris

While radaris.com still comes up prominently in results when searching online for U.S. residents by name, the domain no longer sells detailed personal dossiers on millions of Americans. Its homepage now displays a notice from Atlas, as well as links to our previous reporting on Radaris.

What the emails are said to show

Atlas told KrebsOnSecurity that it has obtained more than 10,000 emails and documents in the course of litigation, and that those messages confirm our previous reporting on the owners and operators of Radaris and its myriad companies.

Atlas said the emails clearly establish that the nominal legal vehicles — 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.; Property Experts, Inc — are all administered by the same three or four people from the same mailboxes, share one bank or payment card set, and are all managed from one 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 (centerex.com, scienteco.com, eprofit.com, realmo.com, pub360.com)," reads a summary shared by Atlas.

— Atlas Data Privacy Corp, in a summary shared with KrebsOnSecurity

Atlas said the emails show Radaris.com earns approximately $42,000 a month, while Veripages.com earns around $45,000 monthly via its partnership with the Lifetime Value Company, a marketing and advertising firm whose brands include PeopleLooker, PeopleSmart, NumberGuru, and Bumper, a car history site.

According to Atlas, the emails also showed the Radaris family of websites earns as much as $25,000 each month from their partnership with Onerep, a company that claims to help people remove their information from people-search sites. In March 2024, KrebsOnSecurity revealed how the Belarusian founder of Onerep had launched and operated dozens of people-search sites over the years and was continuing to operate one of them (Nuwber), effectively spreading the disease and selling the cure.

Fourteen domains, more fines pending

All told, the New Jersey court has so far transferred 14 domain names from the Radaris family of companies to Atlas. Radaris.com now redirects to a notice of the court-ordered domain transfer.

• 14 domain names transferred from the Radaris family of companies to Atlas so far
• $1,000 per violation — the fine Daniel's Law authorizes against data brokers that ignore removal requests
• $7.5 million — the 2017 default judgment plaintiffs could not collect, prompting a domain transfer order that was later halted
• More than 10,000 emails and documents obtained by Atlas during litigation
• Approximately $42,000 a month — Atlas's claim of what radaris.com earns
• Around $45,000 monthly — Atlas's claim of what Veripages.com earns via the Lifetime Value Company partnership
• As much as $25,000 each month — what Atlas says the Radaris family earns from its Onerep partnership

The Radaris family of companies is still potentially facing fines of $1,000 per alleged violation of Daniel's Law. For the time being, however, Daniel's Law is facing a constitutional challenge from virtually all of the 150 other consumer data broker firms being sued by Atlas.

The constitutional fight ahead

The data broker industry responded by having at least 70 of the Atlas lawsuits moved to federal court, challenging the New Jersey statute as overly broad and a violation of the First Amendment. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has not yet issued a decision on the constitutional challenge, but either way the case is widely expected to be appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, at least 14 other states have now passed laws modeled after the New Jersey statute, with more states considering similar measures. However, West Virginia's Daniel's Law was ruled facially unconstitutional under the First Amendment by a federal district court in August 2025.

Justin Sherman is a privacy expert and author of the forthcoming book "The Middlemen," which examines how the data broker industry powers modern surveillance. Sherman said federal lawmakers have long faced intense lobbying by the technology industry against more restrictive U.S. data privacy laws, but that many powerful industries are now working against passing comprehensive data 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," he said.

— Justin Sherman, privacy expert and author of "The Middlemen"

Why the public-records gap persists

Sherman said people-search companies will continue to thrive unless and until Congress enacts meaningful consumer privacy and data protection laws that are relevant to life in the 21st century. That's because virtually all state privacy laws exempt records that might be considered "public" or "government" documents, including voting registries, property filings, marriage certificates, motor vehicle records, criminal records, court documents, death records, professional licenses, bankruptcy filings, and more.

At least 25 states have passed or implemented laws requiring age verification for residents seeking to access adult content online, but there is no federal law that limits how the companies that are scanning everyone's drivers license can use, share or keep the data provided. Had such restrictions been enshrined in law, we may have avoided the recent breach at IDScan.net, which exposed the drivers license information on more than 153 million Americans when the records were briefly turned into a point-and-click identity theft service 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.

— Justin Sherman, privacy expert and author of "The Middlemen"

What this means for the rest of us

The Radaris order is a rare concrete win, but it is a narrow one. The domain transfer was issued against a company that, by its own attorney's account, may not even qualify as a legal entity — which is precisely why Worms says he is seeking to vacate the judgment and appeal. The litigation has also been framed around a New Jersey law that protects a specific class of people: law enforcement officials, government personnel, judges and their families. Nothing about the August 26 order extends those protections to ordinary residents.

That distinction matters for anyone who has ever filed a removal request and heard nothing back. The statute's $1,000-per-violation structure only applies where a protected person's information was published after a removal request was ignored, and virtually all state privacy laws exempt the public and government records that people-search sites are built on. Sherman's point is that the gap is structural, not incidental: without federal legislation covering how those records can be used and shared, the same data that fills these dossiers remains fair game.

The larger question is whether the constitutional challenge now working its way through the Third Circuit changes the calculus. At least 70 of the Atlas lawsuits have been moved to federal court, and the industry's argument — that the New Jersey statute is overly broad and runs afoul of the First Amendment — has already persuaded one federal district court, which struck down West Virginia's version. If that reasoning spreads, the model law that 14 other states have copied could be weakened or voided, and the fines still hanging over the Radaris companies could shrink or disappear.

For readers, the practical lesson is that domain seizures and default judgments are not the same as a durable fix. A transferred domain can be replaced; the underlying data flows and the entities behind them can be renamed. A lasting change would have to come from legislation that covers everyone, not just the officials Daniel's Law was written to protect — and on the current trajectory, that outcome is far from settled.