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A New Jersey court has taken radaris.com away from Radaris, ordering the site and 13 other domains to be handed over to Atlas Data Privacy Corp, the company that sued the data broker over its practices. Radaris was a people-search site that compiled addresses, phone numbers, and family connections from public records and sold access to anyone willing to pay.
Atlas filed the case in February 2024 under Daniel's Law, a New Jersey statute that lets police officers, judges, and other public officials demand that data brokers delete their personal information within 10 days, backed by a $1,000 penalty for every violation. Radaris never showed up in court to defend itself. A default judgment followed, and on August 26 the court ordered the domain transfer, according to Brian Krebs of KrebsOnSecurity, who has covered Radaris's operations for years and broke the story of the transfer this week.
Atlas says Radaris spent years dodging that judgment by constantly restructuring. "We refer to this period as their island-hopping phase," Atlas CEO Matt Adkisson told Krebs. "Privacy policies changed constantly, and new entities kept appearing from places like the Marshall Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and Seychelles." Raj Parikh, the attorney at PEM Law who handled the case for Atlas, said the pattern was familiar to anyone who has tried to sue a people-search site: "In the past, they won by attrition. Plaintiffs' attorneys tired of the procedural games and just gave up."
Krebs's reporting identifies the people behind Radaris as Igor and Dmitry Lubarsky, Russian-born brothers based in Massachusetts who run a network of people-search and Russian-language dating sites. That network includes at least 25 other people-search domains beyond Radaris, none of which are affected by this court order.
For now, radaris.com displays a notice about the ownership transfer instead of selling personal dossiers. Radaris isn't done fighting: attorney Victor Worms told Krebs the company will "pursue all appropriate appeals" because it considers the domain transfer an unconstitutional forfeiture.
Daniel's Law only covers a narrow group: police officers, judges, prosecutors, and their immediate families. Most readers can't invoke it the way Atlas did. Anyone who wants their own information off Radaris's affiliated sites, or off people-search sites generally, still has to go site by site to file a request. Unfortunately, this becomes a game of whack-a-mole because data brokers may only delist your data for a few weeks, rebuild your profile from new publicly available records and feeds from other brokers, or ignore your request entirely. The easiest fix is to use a data removal service, like Incogni or DeleteMe, which monitor data brokers and send take-down notices on your behalf. They cost about $7.50 per month, but having used these services, I recommend them and can attest that they work.