Consumer data broker Radaris.com has long had a reputation for ignoring requests to remove personal information from its vast empire of online people search services. That reputation recently hit the company in a lawsuit accusing Radaris of violating a New Jersey privacy law that imposes hefty fines on data brokers who release personal information about state law enforcement officials.
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Faced with repeated delays and misdirection by Radaris' lawyers, the judge in the case ordered the transfer of radaris.com and more than a dozen other data broker domains to the plaintiffs.
In February 2024, Radaris was sued by Atlas Data Privacy Corp., a company seeking to prosecute data brokers who allegedly violated a New Jersey law called Daniel's Law. The law 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 provides for fines of $1,000 per violation for companies that ignore removal requests.
Less than a month after Atlas filed a lawsuit against Radaris, KrebsOnSecurity published an extensive analysis of Radaris' co-founders — Igor and Dmitry Lubarsky — Russian-born brothers who live in Massachusetts and run a dizzying array of people-finding companies as well as a number of Russian-language dating services and affiliate programs.
Lawyers for the Lubarsky brothers threatened to sue for defamation unless the article was removed and an apology issued. Their lawyer argued that the report was grossly inaccurate and that the real owners of the company were Ukrainians living in Ukraine.
KrebsOnSecurity persisted, showing how the Lubarsky brothers built and ran Radaris and other data broker companies using the name of a fictitious CEO. A subsequent story noted that Radaris’ lawyer — a Boston Law Group named Val Gurvits — admitted that his clients had invented the CEO’s pseudonym “Gary Norden” and that Radaris had also issued numerous press releases over the years citing the fake CEO while seeking money from potential investors.
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Radaris' lawyers waited until the last minute to appear in court and challenge what was almost certain to be a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs, then told the court that Atlas had failed to serve the true owners and managers 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 the Daniel Law. Matt Adkison, Atlas’ president and CEO, said Radaris turned to a tried-and-true playbook: delaying court until the last possible moment and playing games with Radaris’s true country of origin and the individuals listed as owners and operators of these websites.
Atkison described this period as their “island-hopping phase.” Privacy policies were constantly changing, and new entities were popping up from places like the Marshall Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and the Seychelles. He noted that behind the scenes, it felt like a game of shelling. Defense attorneys told the court that some entities were simply managing the domains and were the right places to sue.
But by the time a decision was near, these entities would be dismissed and new entities would emerge, while lawyers argued that the other entities that actually owned the domains should not be held liable.
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Adkison said that when the defendants updated their terms of service to state that Radaris was suddenly being run by a company in the Marshall Islands, Atlas hired an investigator in that country and soon learned that the brand-new entity that Radaris claimed was running the company didn't even exist yet.
