In a decisive legal action that marks one of the most aggressive judicial responses to data broker misconduct to date, a New Jersey judge has ordered the seizure of Radaris.com and more than a dozen affiliated domains, transferring them directly to the plaintiffs in a lawsuit alleging systematic violations of a state privacy law. The ruling follows years of evasion, corporate shell games, and procedural brinkmanship by the operators of what has long been one of the internet’s most tenacious people-search empires.
What Is Daniel’s Law and Why Does It Matter for Data Brokers?
Daniel’s Law is a New Jersey statute that grants state law enforcement officials, government personnel, judges, and their families the right to have their personal information completely removed from commercial data brokers and people-search services. The law carries fines of $1,000 per violation against companies that ignore removal requests. Enacted after a judge’s family tragedy, the statute represents one of the most targeted privacy protections in the United States—but has also become a flashpoint for constitutional challenges from an industry that has long operated with minimal oversight.
The Seizure: How 14 Domains Changed Hands
On August 26, 2025, a New Jersey court found that the defendants behind Radaris had been given multiple opportunities to appear and defend themselves but had failed to do so. The court ordered the transfer of radaris.com and thirteen other domains to Atlas Data Privacy Corp, the company that has been pursuing legal action against data brokers alleged to be violating Daniel’s Law. The domains now redirect to a notice from Atlas explaining the court-ordered transfer. While radaris.com still appears prominently in search results when users look up U.S. residents by name, the domain no longer sells detailed personal dossiers. Its homepage displays the seizure notice, along with links to investigative reporting on the company.
The Island-Hopping Strategy: Data Brokers’ Playbook for Evading Justice
Matt Adkisson, president and CEO of Atlas, described the defendants’ legal tactics as a tried-and-true playbook of delays and jurisdictional games. “We refer to this period as their island-hopping phase,” Adkisson said. “Privacy policies changed constantly, and new entities kept appearing from places like the Marshall Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and Seychelles. 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.”
When the defendants updated their terms of service to claim that Radaris was managed by a company in the Marshall Islands, Atlas hired an investigator in that country and discovered the entity did not yet exist. This pattern of obfuscation had worked for years. In a 2017 class action lawsuit, Radaris won a $7.5 million default judgment overturned on appeal after arguing that the lawsuit had failed to name the actual domain owner—a Cyprus company called Bitseller Expert Limited. The judge in that case halted the domain transfer, and the plaintiffs never refiled. Soon after, Radaris changed its operator from Bitseller to Andtop Company, an entity formed in the Marshall Islands in October 2020.
Raj Parikh, a partner at PEM Law in New Jersey who handles most of the Daniel’s Law litigation for Atlas, noted that this attrition-based strategy had succeeded for over a decade. “Plaintiffs’ attorneys tired of the procedural games and just gave up,” Parikh said. “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.”
Who Owns and Operates Radaris? The Lubarsky Brothers
At the center of the Radaris empire are Igor and Dmitry Lubarsky (also spelled Lybarsky), Russian-born brothers living in Massachusetts. Their operations extend beyond data brokerage into Russian-language dating services and affiliate programs. Investigative reporting has documented how the brothers used a fictitious CEO name—Gary Norden—to operate and promote Radaris. Their attorney, Val Gurvits of the Boston Law Group, admitted that his clients had invented the pseudonym. Radaris had issued multiple press releases quoting the fake CEO while seeking money from potential investors.
When investigative outlets published detailed profiles of the brothers and their operations, attorneys for Radaris threatened defamation lawsuits unless the stories were removed and apologies issued. They asserted that the reporting was wildly inaccurate and that the true owners were Ukrainians living in Ukraine—a claim that collapsed under further scrutiny.
The Email Trail: What 10,000 Documents Reveal
Atlas has obtained more than 10,000 emails and documents through the litigation process, and these materials independently confirm who controls Radaris and its affiliated companies. According to a summary shared by Atlas, the emails establish that the nominal legal vehicles—including 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 administered by the same three or four people, share the same mailboxes, rely on one bank or payment card set, and are managed from a single 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,” the Atlas summary reads. The administrative, financial, and technical functions sit on the difive.com mail domain and its successors, including centerex.com, scienteco.com, eprofit.com, realmo.com, and pub360.com.
How Much Money Does the Radaris Network Generate?
The emails also detail the financial scale of the operation. Radaris.com earns approximately $42,000 per month, while Veripages.com brings in around $45,000 monthly through its partnership with the Lifetime Value Company, a marketing and advertising firm whose brands include PeopleLooker, PeopleSmart, NumberGuru, and Bumper, a car history site. The Radaris family of websites also earns up to $25,000 each month from its partnership with Onerep, a company that claims to help consumers remove their information from people-search sites. That relationship is particularly notable: Onerep’s Belarusian founder had previously launched and operated dozens of people-search sites himself, effectively profiting from both the creation of the problem and the sale of the solution.
The Constitutional challenge: Can Daniel’s Law Survive First Amendment Scrutiny?
While the seizure of Radaris’s domains represents a major tactical victory for privacy advocates, the broader legal framework that enabled it faces an existential challenge. Daniel’s Law is being contested in federal court by virtually all of the 150 consumer data broker firms that Atlas has sued. The data broker industry has moved at least 70 of those lawsuits to federal court, arguing that 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 issued a decision, but the case is widely expected to reach the U.S. Supreme Court.
In August 2025, a federal district court in West Virginia ruled that state’s version of Daniel’s Law was facially unconstitutional under the First Amendment. At the same time, at least 14 other states have passed laws modeled after the New Jersey statute, with more states considering similar measures. The tension between privacy protection and free expression is likely to intensify as the legal battles move through the appellate system.
The Federal Privacy Vacuum: Why Data Brokers Keep Winning
Justin Sherman, a privacy expert and author of the forthcoming book “The Middlemen,” which examines how the data broker industry powers modern surveillance, pointed to the absence of comprehensive federal privacy legislation as the root cause. “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,” Sherman said.
People-search companies will continue to thrive, Sherman argued, unless and until Congress enacts meaningful consumer privacy and data protection laws that are relevant to 21st-century life. The reason is structural: virtually all state privacy laws exempt 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. These exemptions create a legal safe harbor for the data broker industry to operate.
Age Verification Laws and the IDScan.net Breach: A Cautionary Tale
At least 25 states have passed or implemented laws requiring age verification for residents seeking to access adult content online. Yet there is no federal law that limits how the companies scanning everyone’s driver’s license can use, share, or retain that data. The consequences of this regulatory gap were starkly illustrated by the recent breach at IDScan.net, which exposed the driver’s license information of more than 153 million Americans when the records were briefly turned into a point-and-click identity theft service on the dark web. Had stronger federal restrictions been in place, that breach might have been prevented—or its impact significantly mitigated.
“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. 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.”
The Defense Responds: A Motion to Vacate and Constitutional Arguments
In response to the court-ordered domain transfer, the defense has signaled it intends to fight back. Victor Worms, the attorney now handling the case, asserted that the New Jersey court transferred Radaris.com to Atlas as part of a default judgment against Radaris.com, which he argued 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.”
Whether those arguments succeed will depend on how the courts resolve the tension between state privacy protections and constitutional due process. For now, however, the seizure of Radaris’s domains stands as the most concrete enforcement action ever taken under Daniel’s Law—and a signal that the era of procedural gamesmanship in the data broker industry may be drawing to a close.
