The consumer data broker Radaris. com has long had a reputation for ignoring requests to remove personal information from its vast empire of people-search services online. That reputation caught up with the company recently in a lawsuit alleging Radaris violated a New Jersey privacy law that provides for hefty fines against data brokers that publish personal information on state law enforcement officials.
In the face of repeated stonewalling and prevarication by attorneys for Radaris, the judge in the case ordered that radaris. com and more than a dozen other data broker domains be transferred to the plaintiffs. The radaris.
com website, prior to the domain transfer to Atlas. In February 2024, Radaris was sued 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 provides for fines of $1,000 per violation against companies that ignore removal requests.
Less than a month after Atlas sued Radaris, 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. Attorneys for the Lubarsky brothers threatened to sue for defamation if the story wasn’t removed and an apology issued.
Their attorney asserted that our reporting was wildly inaccurate, and that the true owners of the company were Ukrainians living in Ukraine. The Lubarsky brothers Dmitry or “Dan” (left) and Gary/Igor. KrebsOnSecurity doubled down and showed how the Lubarsky brothers built and operated Radaris and other data broker companies using a fictitious CEO’s name .
Our follow-up story noted that Radaris’s attorney — a lawyer with the Boston Law Group named Val Gurvits — admitted his clients had invented the CEO pseudonym “ Gary Norden ,” and that Radaris also had issued multiple press releases over the years that quoted the fake CEO while seeking money from potential investors. 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.”
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. Mr. 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.
Mr. 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’ 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 (PDF) in the Marshall Islands in Oct. 2020. The plaintiffs never re-filed their lawsuit.
A mind map of various entities tied to Radaris and the company’s co-founders. Click to enlarge. “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.” 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.
Mr. Gurvits declined to comment on the case, saying it had been assigned to another attorney, a Mr. Victor Worms .
In response to questions, Mr. Worms asserted the New Jersey court transferred Radaris.
Originally published at krebsonsecurity.com
