On March 8, 2024, KrebsOnSecurity published a deep dive on the consumer data broker Radaris, showing how the original owners are two men in Massachusetts who operated multiple Russian language dating services and affiliate programs, in addition to a dizzying array of people-search websites. The subjects of that piece are threatening to sue KrebsOnSecurity for defamation unless the story is retracted. Meanwhile, their attorney has admitted that the person Radaris named as the CEO from its inception is a fabricated identity.
Radaris is just one cog in a sprawling network of people-search properties online that sell highly detailed background reports on U.S. consumers and businesses. Those reports typically include the subject’s current and previous addresses, partial Social Security numbers, any known licenses, email addresses and phone numbers, as well as the same information for any of their immediate relatives.
Radaris has a less-than-stellar reputation when it comes to responding to consumers seeking to have their reports removed from its various people-search services. That poor reputation, combined with indications that the true founders of Radaris have gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal their stewardship of the company, was what prompted KrebsOnSecurity to investigate the origins of Radaris in the first place.
On April 18, KrebsOnSecurity received a certified letter (PDF) from Valentin “Val” Gurvits, an attorney with the Boston Law Group, stating that KrebsOnSecurity would face a withering defamation lawsuit unless the Radaris story was immediately retracted and an apology issued to the two brothers named in the story as co-founders.
That March story worked backwards from the email address used to register radaris.com, and charted an impressive array of data broker companies created over the past 15 years by Massachusetts residents Dmitry and Igor Lubarsky (also sometimes spelled Lybarsky or Lubarski). Dmitry goes by “Dan,” and Igor uses the name “Gary.”
Those businesses included numerous websites marketed to Russian-speaking people who are new to the United States, such as russianamerica.com, newyork.ru, russiancleveland.com, russianla.com, russianmiami.com, etc. Other domains connected to the Lubarskys included Russian-language dating and adult websites, as well as affiliate programs for their international calling card businesses.
A mind map of various entities apparently tied to Radaris and the company’s co-founders. Click to enlarge.
The story on Radaris noted that the Lubarsky brothers registered most of their businesses using a made-up name — “Gary Norden,” sometimes called Gary Nord or Gary Nard.
Mr. Gurvits’ letter stated emphatically that my reporting was lazy, mean-spirited, and obviously intended to smear the reputation of his clients. By way of example, Mr. Gurvits said the Lubarskys were actually Ukrainian, and that the story painted his clients in a negative light by insinuating that they were somehow associated with Radaris and with vaguely nefarious elements in Russia.
But more to the point, Mr. Gurvits said, neither of his clients were Gary Norden, and neither had ever held any leadership positions at Radaris, nor were they financial beneficiaries of the company in any way.
“Neither of my clients is a founder of Radaris, and neither of my clients is the CEOs of Radaris,” Gurvits wrote. “Additionally, presently and going back at least the past 10 years, neither of my clients are (or were) officers or employees of Radaris. Indeed, neither of them even owns (or ever owned) any equity in Radaris. In intentional disregard of these facts, the Article implies that my clients are personally responsible for Radaris’ actions. Therefore, you intentionally caused all negative allegations in the Article made with respect to Radaris to be imputed against my clients personally.”
Dan Lubarsky’s Facebook page, just prior to the March 8 story about Radaris, said he was from Moscow.
We took Mr. Gurvits’ word on the ethnicity of his clients, and adjusted the story to remove a single mention that they were Russian. We did so even though Dan Lubarsky’s own Facebook page said (until recently) that he was from Moscow, Russia.
KrebsOnSecurity asked Mr. Gurvits to explain precisely which other details in the story were incorrect, and replied that we would be happy to update the story with a correction if they could demonstrate any errors of fact or omission.
We also requested specifics about several aspects of the story, such as the identity of the current Radaris CEO — listed on the Radaris website as “Victor K.” Mr. Gurvits replied that Radaris is and always has been based in Ukraine, and that the company’s true founder “Eugene L” is based there.
While Radaris has claimed to have offices in Massachusetts, Cyprus and Latvia, its website has never mentioned Ukraine. Mr. Gurvits has not responded to requests for more information about the identities of “Eugene L” or “Victor K.”
Gurvits said he had no intention of doing anyone’s reporting for them, and that the Lubarskys were going to sue KrebsOnSecurity for defamation unless the story was retracted in full. KrebsOnSecurity replied that journalists often face challenges to things that they report, but it is more than rare for one who makes a challenge to take umbrage at being asked for supporting information.
On June 13, Mr. Gurvits sent another letter (PDF) that continued to claim KrebsOnSecurity was defaming his clients, only this time Gurvits said his clients would be satisfied if KrebsOnSecurity just removed their names from the story.
“Ultimately, my clients don’t care what you say about any of the websites or corporate entities in your Article, as long as you completely remove my clients’ names from the Article and cooperate with my clients to have copies of the Article where my clients’ names appear removed from the Internet,” Mr. Gurvits wrote.
MEET THE FAKE RADARIS CEO
The June 13 letter explained that the name Gary Norden was a pseudonym invented by the Radaris marketing division, but that neither of the Lubarsky brothers were Norden.
This was a startling admission, given that Radaris has quoted the fictitious Gary Norden in press releases published and paid for by Radaris, and in news media stories where the company is explicitly seeking money from investors. In other words, Radaris has been misrepresenting itself to investors from the beginning. Here’s a press release from Radaris that was published on PR Newswire in April 2011:
A press release published by Radaris in 2011 names the CEO of Radaris as Gary Norden, which was a fake name made up by Radaris’ marketing department.
In April 2014, the Boston Business Journal published a story (PDF) about Radaris that extolled the company’s rapid growth and considerable customer base. The story noted that, “to date, the company has raised less than $1 million from Cyprus-based investment company Difive.”
“We live in a world where information becomes much more broad and much more available every single day,” the Boston Business Journal quoted Radaris’ fake CEO Gary Norden, who by then had somehow been demoted from CEO to vice president of business development.
A Boston Business Journal story from April 2014 quotes the fictitious Radaris CEO Gary Norden.
“We decided there needs to be a service that allows for ease of monitoring of information about people,” the fake CEO said. The story went on to say Radaris was seeking to raise between $5 million and $7 million from investors in the ensuing months.
THE BIG LUBARSKY
In his most recent demand letter, Mr. Gurvits helpfully included resumes for both of the Lubarsky brothers.
Dmitry Lubarsky’s resume states he is the owner of Difive.com, a startup incubator for IT companies. Recall that Difive is the same company mentioned by the fake Radaris CEO in the 2014 Boston Business Journal story, which said Difive was the company’s initial and sole investor.
Difive’s website in 2016 said it had offices in Boston, New York, San Francisco, Riga (Latvia) and Moscow (nothing in Ukraine). Meanwhile, DomainTools.com reports difive.com was originally registered in 2007 to the fictitious Gary Norden from Massachusetts.
Archived copies of the Difive website from 2017 include a “Portfolio” page indexing all of the companies in which Difive has invested. That list, available here, includes virtually every “Gary Norden” domain name mentioned in my original report, plus a few that escaped notice earlier.
Dan Lubarsky’s resume says he was CEO of a people search company called HumanBook. The Wayback machine at archive.org shows the Humanbook domain (humanbook.com) came online around April 2008, when the company was still in “beta” mode.
By August 2008, however, humanbook.com had changed the name advertised on its homepage to Radaris Beta. Eventually, Humanbook simply redirected to radaris.com.
Archive.org’s record of humanbook.com from 2008, just after its homepage changed to Radaris Beta.
Astute readers may notice that the domain radaris.com is not among the companies listed as Difive investments. However, passive domain name system (DNS) records from DomainTools show that between October 2023 and March 2024 radaris.com was hosted alongside all of the other Gary Norden domains at the Internet address range 38.111.228.x.
That address range simultaneously hosted every domain mentioned in this story and in the original March 2024 report as connected to email addresses used by Gary Norden, including radaris.com, radaris.ru, radaris.de, difive.com, privet.ru, blog.ru, comfi.com, phoneowner.com, russianamerica.com, eprofit.com, rehold.com, homeflock.com, humanbook.com and dozens more. A spreadsheet of those historical DNS entries for radaris.com is available here (.csv).
Image: DomainTools.com
The breach tracking service Constella Intelligence finds just two email addresses ending in difive.com have been exposed in data breaches over the years: dan@difive.com, and gn@difive.com. Presumably, “gn” stands for Gary Norden.
A search on the email address gn@difive.com via the breach tracking service osint.industries reveals this address was used to create an account at Airbnb under the name Gary, with the last four digits of the account’s phone number ending in “0001.”
Constella Intelligence finds gn@difive.com was associated with the Massachusetts number 617-794-0001, which was used to register accounts for “Igor Lybarsky” from Wellesley or Sherborn, Ma. at multiple online businesses, including audiusa.com and the designer eyewear store luxottica.com.
The phone number 617-794-0001 also appears for a “Gary Nard” user at russianamerica.com. Igor Lubarsky’s resume says he was the manager of russianamerica.com.
DomainTools finds 617-794-0001 is connected to registration records for three domains, including paytone.com, a domain that Dan Lubarsky’s resume says he managed. DomainTools also found that number on the registration records for trustoria.com, another major consumer data broker that has an atrocious reputation, according to the Better Business Bureau.
Dan Lubarsky’s resume says he was responsible for several international telecommunications services, including the website comfi.com. DomainTools says the phone number connected to that domain — 617-952-4234 — was also used on the registration records for humanbook.net/biz/info/mobi/us, as well as for radaris.me, radaris.in, and radaris.tel.
Two other key domains are connected to that phone number. The first is barsky.com, which is the website for Barsky Estate Realty Trust (PDF), a real estate holding company controlled by the Lubarskys. Naturally, DomainTools finds barsky.com also was registered to a Gary Norden from Massachusetts. But the organization listed in the barsky.com registration records is Comfi Inc., a VOIP communications firm that Dan Lubarsky’s resume says he managed.
The other domain of note is unipointtechnologies.com. Dan Lubarsky’s resume says he was the CEO of Wellesley Hills, Mass-based Unipoint Technology Inc. In 2012, Unipoint was fined $179,000 by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, which said the company had failed to apply for a license to provide international telecommunications services.
A pandemic assistance loan granted in 2020 to Igor Lybarsky of Sherborn, Ma. shows he received the money to an entity called Norden Consulting.
Notice the name on the recipient of this government loan for Igor Lybarsky from Sherborn, Ma: Norden Consulting.
PATENTLY REMARKABLE
The 2011 Radaris press release quoting their fake CEO Gary Norden said the company had four patents pending from a team of computer science PhDs. According to the resume shared by Mr. Gurvits, Dan Lubarsky has a PhD in computer science.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) says Dan Lubarsky/Lubarski has at least nine technology patents to his name. The fake CEO press release from Radaris mentioning its four patents was published in April 2011. By that time, the PTO says Dan Lubarsky had applied for exactly four patents, including, “System and Method for a Web-Based People Directory.” The first of those patents, published in 2009, is tied to Humanbook.com, the company Dan Lubarsky founded that later changed its name to Radaris.
If the Lubarskys were never involved in Radaris, how do they or their attorney know the inside information that Gary Norden is a fiction of Radaris’ marketing department? KrebsOnSecurity has learned that Mr. Gurvits is the same attorney responding on behalf of Radaris in a lawsuit against the data broker filed earlier this year by Atlas Data Privacy.
Mr. Gurvits also stepped forward as Radaris’ attorney in a class action lawsuit the company 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 judge ordered the domain registry Verisign to transfer the radaris.com domain name to the plaintiffs.
Mr. Gurvits appealed the verdict, arguing that 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 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. Andtop also operates the aforementioned people-search service Trustoria.
Mr. Gurvits’ most-publicized defamation case was a client named Aleksej Gubarev, a Russian technology executive whose name appeared in the Steele Dossier. That document included a collection of salacious, unverified information gathered by the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign at the direction of former president Donald Trump’s political rivals.
Gubarev, the head of the IT services company XBT Holding and the Florida web hosting firm Webzilla, sued BuzzFeed for publishing the Steele dossier. One of the items in the dossier alleged that XBT/Webzilla and affiliated companies played a key role in the hack of Democratic Party computers in the spring of 2016. The memo alleged Gubarev had been coerced into providing services to Russia’s main domestic security agency, known as the FSB.
In December 2018, a federal judge in Miami ruled in favor of BuzzFeed, saying the publication was protected by the fair report privilege, which gives news organizations latitude in reporting on official government proceedings.
Radaris was originally operated by Bitseller Expert Limited. Who owns Bitseller Expert Limited? A report (PDF) obtained from the Cyprus business registry shows this company lists its director as Pavel Kaydash from Moscow. Mr. Kaydash could not be reached for comment.
I am currently falling down a rabbithole. Scienteco is also Centerex.com, which … does what? … and why is there a messenger screenshot about a convo including someone named Ashley, discussing a Walnut Apartment on the last page of the lawyer-supplied Gary Lubarsky bio? So. many. questions.
that would be exhibit 3:
Indeed, when the various negative allegations you make are taken in totality, your article is not
about Radaris at all. Your Article is an intentional personal attack on Dan and Gary Lubarsky.
Your Article defamed my clients and its effect is clear and demonstrable. For example, Gary
Lubarsky recently was denied an apartment because the landlord saw your Article. Please see
the screenshot attached hereto as Exhibit 3.
So that’s what it feels like to have a landlord deny your tenancy application because they ordered a report for you from Radaris!
I applaud this comment.
Interesting that a European based company is offering historical identity checking services on US residents, when not one single member of their Executive team declares their surname, is indefensibly unethical. What have they got to hide? And why have the Lubarsky brothers gone to such lengths to hide their true identities in connection with these entities?
The irony here, is that the EU passed “The Right To Erasure” GDPR privacy laws to protect its citizens from the unscrupulous actions and insidious behaviours of data hoarding corporations, for profit with no consequences. The fact that the original architects of this scheme are experiencing the very same affects as those that they have profited off for so long is sweet justice in and of itself. Bravo Brian.
The reporting on this article is AMAZING. I can’t even imagine how much work went into it. Not sure how Radaris can continue to respond after this. Hope you can spread the story wider so more of their businesses are impacted and customers know about it.
SenorKrebs is like WuTang.. ain’t nothin to f with
“Taken in totality”? What does that mean? What defines an allegation as “negative”? It sounds like a landlord was able to use facts reported by Brian to make a determination that Dmitry & Igor have aspects of their lives that make him (the landlord) uncomfortable with renting to Igor. It is entirely the right of the landlord to gather factual information outside of qualities around identity, sex, and religion to make a determination on who he is renting to.
Another of these scumbag info sellers is GladIKnow.com. But their CEO is an upstanding CA attorney, and every sentence out of his mouth is a noun, a verb, and the acronym FCRA. Their practices are just as shady, though. I had them ‘remove’ my name. But they keep sending email every. effing. week. to my sock puppet announcing that they’ve ‘found’ more records on me.
Competent lawyers do not conduct defamation proceedings in comment sections. Based on this post, either you’re not the guy who sent the C&D or you are (and are a terrible lawyer) or you’re not a real lawyer at all and are misrepresenting yourself as an attorney (which, BTW, is a crime).
Maybe he’s pro se…
It’s illegal in the US to practice law without a license, not to falsely claim to be a lawyer.
Actually, that’s state law and it varies by state. Some states are stricter than others on what constitutes practicing law. Merely passing oneself off as a lawyer then making a statement that can be construed by Average Joe as legal advice is enough to trigger such a statute. I’m not saying they’re strictly enforced, but one doesn’t want to be the “make an example of” case some local DA with a burr under their saddle blanket because election year pursues.
US First Amendment law is complex, but fraudulently passing oneself off as an Authority to convince people to change their actions isn’t protected speech.
Dan and Gary not only seem like criminals, they seem to be having a difficult time retaining competent counsel.
“Indeed, when the various negative allegations you make are taken in totality, your article is not about Radaris at all. Your Article is an intentional personal attack on Dan and Gary Lubarsky. Your Article defamed my clients and its effect is clear and demonstrable. For example, Gary Lubarsky recently was denied an apartment because the landlord saw your Article. Please see the screenshot attached hereto as Exhibit 3. “
Sounds like they make these people-search sites. Here’s a job posting: https://centerex.com/php-vac (archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20231202124438/http://centerex.com/php-vac). The team speaks Russian and works in the GMT+2 or GMT+3 time zone.
I love your work.
Are these dirtbagskis still in MA?
I hope they get to tour the US – prison system.
This is a very complicated case, Brian. You know, a lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what-have-you’s. A lotta strands to keep in my head, man.
Excellent work as always, Brian!
Absolutely smoked them Krebs. Great job as always, they shoulda just left it alone. LOL
It appears the lawyer in this case has some serious ethics violations as he knew dam well they were the same people since he represented them in the past. By lying on this cease and desist letter he could lose his license.
–maybe. Krebs, you should report him.
The lawyer has no record of public discipline on the state bar site (https://www.massbbo.org/s/attorney-lookup?fName&lName=Gurvits&loc&bboNumber). Advocacy is expected, but there’s a line that lawyers can’t cross:
Massachusetts Rule of Professional Conduct 1.2(d):
(d) A lawyer shall not counsel a client to engage, or assist a client, in conduct that the lawyer knows is criminal or fraudulent, but a lawyer may discuss the legal consequences of any proposed course of conduct with a client and may counsel or assist a client to make a good faith effort to determine the validity, scope, meaning, or application of the law.
“Good news, everyone!” Both Massachusetts and Virginia have anti-SLAPP laws (details and procedures may vary).
The Lube abides.
Anti-SLAPP laws…..Good news indeed. I hope this threat will never go to court but after last night I am not so sure anymore.
Historically defamation was a crime even if the allegations were true! (https://www.journaloffreespeechlaw.org/helmreich.pdf)
With the prospect of more supreme court rulings into backwardedness, who knows…?
Kudos Brian for the bold decision to double down on your reporting here. It’s clear the Lubarskys don’t care what is said about Raidaris, as long as they can maintain anonymity and avoid consequences for their unscrupulous business; such as supposedly being denied a rental property based on the article. It’s also worth a wager the lawyer here doesn’t actually intend to sue, because then he’d have to prove otherwise to a Court. This information either doesn’t exist (because the reporting is true), or they’re unwilling to clarify more about the shady company’s owners. Please, find me a jury that will rule in favor of a company with a fake “avatar pseudonym” CEO and the lawyer that represents them.
The filing is what it is, nothing more to threaten Brian.
It’s still just AFAIK a LETTER, not a court filing. Legal Obs is correct absolutely, if they took this to court they would be exposing themselves to discovery and depositions. They would be destroyed.
I love getting sued by fictional characters to protect other fictional characters. I currently owe $25,000 for defamation against Mr Krabs restraunt. Real talk, I’m happy you’re not letting these crooks bully you around. Theu use fake names because their “business” is harmful to the public. Everyone despises them.
For me, here are the article’s 3 salient points:
(1) Brian is a remarkably good investigator.
(2) Don’t falsely accuse Brian of anything or threaten him, because you’ll regret it.
(3) The Moscow ownership mentioned at the end hints the perps’ Russian white-collar B-grade techno thuggery may overlap with Russian state sponsorship.
a full blown domain tools acc. is almost all you need today to unravel all of this..I had one for the time when I was active then I found court documents in my mailbox, a bug under my car, a bug in my apartment and had two search warrants from the attorney general. Plus private detectives following me all over europe….Domaintools was sold….I quit!
Brian sticks to it 🙂
Good luck.
“oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive”. – fantastic report and utterly above my paygrade, altho it confirms my worse fears that the internet has just made it easier to do a lot of things nefariously. And perhaps humans, or some humans, have a proclivity to be crooks.
I do have a personal request, based entirely on my vast ignorance. I have been following you, Mr. Krebs for some years, and a couple other guys who have dedicated themselves to being beacons of light rather than black-hearted villains. I am literally a brick and mortar guy with little real education in IT matters except that I did manage to find my way to linux which I have been using for about 20 years. My request is that if possible, you could share a list of other qualified folks who operate in a similar arena as you. Fact checkers and morale humans.
Just as the FDA once had a list of food additives (GRAS), generally recognized as safe, it would be of tremendous value to have some kind of baseline group of solid and legitimate folks I could use as a reference to what is appropriate and honorable. In addition, I would be able to direct friends and family to solid sources of info. I know this is a low level kind of request and not the kind of thing you usually do, but I assure you it would be of vast help to those of us unwashed in the bloody work of IT security.
My daughter is a journalist with 20+ years of solid achievement (a Masters from Berkeley) operating a crime and public safety news reporting site in the San Fran Bay area so I do know what good reporting looks like. But the tide of dis and mis info is great and I feel I need more effective tools to negotiate the flow. Thank you for all you do to elucidate the chaos.
Attorney should change his name from Mr.Gurvit to Mr.Dimwit
Redaris is definitely a corrupt organization who does not respond to consumer requests to remove info.
Man-oh-Shevitt! Excellent reporting Mr. Krebs. I had to get out the pencil and paper just to keep track of everything. I’m not sure where you stand right now but please let us know. I will follow this story for sure. Thanks.
cof cof “41 N. Main, Sherborn Saga Continues” cof cof
> https://medium.com/@deckerthinktank/41-n-main-sherborn-saga-continues-dc23e4d1bebc (2020)
“Igor Lybarsky bought these properties back in 2014 and my belief is he and his associates are flushing money and will be lucky if they ever make any money on this deal. Even at this point it could be another 5 years to begin construction. For comparisons, Whitney Farms (now rebranded) on Whitney St. began the permitting process in 2003, included a court case in MA Land Court, changed ownership, and 17 years later the development still has not been completed.
Lybarsky has spent the last few years bringing flimsy commercial ideas to the Town without yet wielding the 40-B legal development stick. He presented to the town an assisted living facility concept and tried to convince the town to pay for a multi-million-dollar sewer plant that placed all the construction, operating, and financing risk on the Town.”
Problem continues until the justice dept locks the offenders up. Blame government and the pay to play system.
THE BIG LUBARSKY. Comedy gold Brian!
Mr. Krebs,
Please note that it is illegal to “THREATEN” anyone with a lawsuit in most states. If your adversaries had any brains, they would have stopped at something like, “Well, maybe we ought to see what a judge thinks about this.”
Sounds to me like whoever is their legal counsel is an idiot.
“Please note that it is illegal to “THREATEN” anyone with a lawsuit in most states.”
-Not really at all. If there is a plausible basis for a suit anyone can “threaten” to bring one.
https://processserver.io/is-telling-someone-you-will-sue-them-a-threat/
” if you have a valid basis to sue someone, you absolutely can threaten to do so. A threat to sue, when based on legitimate legal grounds, is typically seen as part of legal negotiations and not inherently unlawful.”
Threats beyond what are legal bases for a suit may be a crime, depending. Extortion, etc.
“I’ll call my lawyer” is the adult version of “I tell my mom”…
More like, will they spend the money to actually bring the suit, or just hire an esquired-letter-writer to sternly communicate an ultimatum in the hope that a party will negotiate or cave. The Boston Law Group has at least one of those, apparently.
Why? A subscription to GPT4 is like $20USD. You’d be surprised at what the full blown version can do. I do pro se legal work, and GPT4 has helped immensely. I’m scared to think at what the mil version can do. I imagine the new Boston Dynamics bot with Krav Maga training and a Nicolas Machiavelli mindset…
It’s going to be a thing until the first AI lawyer gets disbarred for inventing case law.
Fines have been issued already for “hallucinatory filings”… If you use it in your cases you are warned to apply the old Russian proverb: “trust but verify”.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/lawyers-have-real-bad-day-in-court-after-citing-fake-cases-made-up-by-chatgpt/
Wow! Excellent job.
Excellent! As a compliance professional, I respect your work and the level of due diligence you demonstrate. However, over the past few years working with corporate players, I’ve found it disheartening how many “leaders” seem to do the bare minimum to protect citizens’ information. Yes, implementing proper controls can be expensive, but the cost of lawsuits and reputational damage can be far greater, potentially shutting down your business.
Often, these companies are guided by legal advisors from well-known firms. I’ve frequently sat in meetings wondering, “Whose side are they on?” and questioned their motives for misleading their clients. Often the leadership and their counsel spend their time gaslighting the compliance leader, just to keep the show on the road.
I share this to highlight that some “legal advisors” are the real suspects. Sadly, they are often regarded as “industry experts.” In my opinion, at the end of the day, they will pay DOJ fines, and its business as usual. There’s no compliance.
Follow the money….it can be disheartening. Kudos to your research and thank you for all you do.
Good Luck!
privacyisgone
I’d like to know how many times the US Government (specifically three letter agencies) have utilized the services of these interwoven companies and whether or not the IRS is taxing each appropriately? Additionally, have any politicians anywhere invested in these companies? Alice might not make it back from Wonderland. Thanks for the years of articles and research.
So as someone who works in the world of stopping synthetic identity fraud I’m curious if fake “Gary” has a social security number, credit profile and bank accounts? Somehow I don’t think “Gary” is just a made of marketing name.
Fascinating investigative work, but I suspect this story is far from over. All of those interlocking business entities, false names, and curious coincidents suggests this entire business structure may be a form of “maskirovka”, an effort to mislead or redirect attention or obfuscate the truth and-or to hide from public observation. Granted, “maskirovka” is a Russian military concept but it seems to fit in this case. And then there is that real estate PDF file which shows that those Mass. government entities may be dealing with yet another form of “maskirovka” where the differences in the various project filings over time suggest (to me at least) an effort to get the project approved while the filers hope the government folks do not have long memories nor will they check the paperwork history.
If they sue you, may what you receive in discovery and damages be glorious.
I don’t like that you mention their ethnicity at all. While they might be from Russia… what difference does that make.
IF THEY ARE US CITIZENS… THEY ARE AS AMERICAN AS YOU.
This is just another slander piece against people of russian decent.
‘I don’t like that you mention their ethnicity at all … blah, blah, blah’
Well tough titties to you then hey. If you have followed Brian Kreb’s journalism long enough, you would know that he is a bloodhound when it comes to cyber crime and malicious digital activity. The internet is GLOBAL and knows no borders in his reality. He has reported on many nationalities over the years; that is the nature of his investigations.
If Radaris’ activities hadn’t been morally/ethically questionable, then they would not have drawn his attention. But they were and he did. All he has done is peel back the layers, look underneath and report on what he saw. Any connections to Eastern Europe is inconsequential and a you problem, not his.
Russophobia? … I think not. You need to get off your high horse, stop playing the victim and grow up.
please get your terms straight. In your first sentence you are saying “ethnicity”, and then you proceed to “US citizen […] as Amerian as you”.
So while I can accept that depending on context, there may be something like a Russian ethnicity (doubtful though after what Stalin did with deporting everyone across the country) or a US ethnicity (ahem, this one is getting difficult), there is no way a citizenship can change your ethnicity… so what’s your point?
Wow, what a story. Have you sold the rights to Netflix?
bn
Not a lawyer here, but, if they claim in court that they have never received any compensation from the companies in question, would they not have to provide all their financial information to the court? I’d bet they don’t want to do that!
Kudos Brian. Simply amazing investigative work on your part. I am flabergasted by your skills!
A few random observations. These individuals have more money than BK, and they may want to force him to spend lots of his money to fight their lawsuit(s). A war of attrition, so to speak–strategically similar to Russia’s current attack on Ukraine. It’s also possible that the Lubarskys have hoodwinked an attorney who doesn’t understand just how obvious their connections to these various enterprises are.