BeenVerified

Atlas Data Privacy Corporation brought this under Daniel's Law, the New Jersey statute that entitles judges, prosecutors, law enforcement officers and their households to have a website take down their home address and unpublished phone number. It sued as assignee for 19,398 of them, by the defendants' own count in their notice of removal, and alleged the family's sites kept their details up after being asked to take them down. The companies took it to federal court in April 2024.

On November 20, 2024, Judge Harvey Bartle III returned it to Mercer County, one of 39 Atlas suits he sent back that day after finding the federal court lacked jurisdiction, and the Third Circuit refused the companies permission to appeal on March 18, 2025. The case was on Atlas's November 2025 list of 111 pending state suits, and the state's Supreme Court refused to coordinate them on May 1, 2026. The companies' own notice of removal says BeenVerified, Inc. is no longer in existence.

• CourtListener docket ->
• Notice of removal (PDF) ->

This one isn't about what BeenVerified publishes. It's about what the site does to the people who look themselves up on it. Sherif Sherif says he searched his own phone number on beenverified.com in November 2025 to see what the company held on him, and that the visit itself was watched. His complaint counts 49 third-party trackers on the site, among them 20 cookies, two canvas fingerprinting scripts and a session recorder built on Microsoft tools that follows cursor movement, clicks, scrolling and typing, down to text a visitor types and then deletes without sending. Because the site is where people type names, addresses and identity details, the complaint says the recordings catch that too, and that Microsoft holds them for up to 90 days.

Each tracker is cast as an unlawful wiretap under California Penal Code section 631 and as a pen register under section 638.51, which carries $5,000 a violation, with the federal Wiretap Act, California's computer data access law, the state constitution's privacy right and unfair competition law stacked on top. The cookie banner doesn't settle it, the complaint argues, because the trackers load before a visitor can use the banner, and the session recorder and the fingerprinting scripts keep running for anyone who declines cookies.

BeenVerified moved to dismiss in June 2026. The plaintiff amended instead of answering, and the company moved again on August 14 against the new version, which isn't in the free archives, so what's described here is the original complaint. The plaintiff's opposition went in on September 14, 2026, with a corrected version the next day, the company's reply is due September 28, and Judge Jon S. Tigar set argument for December 10, 2026. Nothing had been decided when we read the docket for this update, and the court has parked the case schedule until the motion is resolved.

• CourtListener docket ->
• The complaint (PDF) ->

Frederick Collins, a Colorado resident, sued over his cell number appearing on beenverified.com, under a 2005 addition to Colorado's telemarketing statute, which forbids knowingly listing a mobile number in a commercial directory unless its owner has affirmatively consented. His lawyers at Bursor & Fisher said BeenVerified's free search previews show Coloradans' cell numbers to draw people into its paid reports, and they sought the statute's damages for a class of Colorado residents. The companies moved to dismiss in March 2026. The complaint was amended in April to add six more LTVCO companies, and in July the judge denied that motion as moot.

On August 11, 2026, weeks before the companies' renewed motion to dismiss was due, the plaintiff filed a notice dropping all eight defendants without prejudice. The claim was never decided, and no public filing explains the withdrawal.

• The complaint (PDF) ->
• CourtListener docket ->
• PacerMonitor, with the dismissal notice ->

Six months after Collins, a second Colorado resident brought the same state telemarketing claim against BeenVerified, LLC in the same courthouse, through a different firm. The complaint argues beenverified.com is a directory in the plain sense of the word, quotes the site's own people-search page saying a name lookup may turn up cell phone numbers, and asks for the statute's penalty on behalf of every Coloradan whose mobile number was listed for sale there.

It lasted eight days. No lawyer had appeared for BeenVerified when the plaintiff withdrew it on September 30, 2025 under Rule 41, without prejudice and without costs, and nothing on the docket explains why. What came next is easy to misread as a revival, because the docket shows a second complaint after that, but that's housekeeping. The first one had gone in under seal, since it reproduced the plaintiff's own BeenVerified listing, so Judge Valerie E. Caproni ordered him on October 2 to show cause why the rest of it shouldn't be public, and a redacted copy went up on October 6, 2025. The case has been closed since the day of the dismissal notice. The free dockets end with that redacted copy, and a docket service that pulled the case again on September 21, 2026 still showed nothing after it, though only PACER itself would show a newer filing.

We're pointing at the docket rather than the filing here, because the copy of the complaint sitting in the free court archives is the unredacted one.

• Docket, with the text of every entry to October 6, 2025 ->

This is the California cousin of the Illinois claim below, and it reached across more of the business. David Escobar, who had never subscribed to either site, said BeenVerified was putting his name, addresses, phone numbers and his relatives' names into a free teaser profile and using it to sell a $29.99-a-month subscription, then emailing anyone who had looked him up to say their search on him was ready. The complaint covers PeopleSmart alongside beenverified.com, and it names both BeenVerified companies, pointing out that BeenVerified, Inc. wasn't actively registered in New York or Delaware yet still held the copyright line at the foot of the site.

His lawyers got out in front of the arbitration clause before they went looking. On December 3, 2021, before taking a single screenshot, they wrote to BeenVerified saying they had no authority to accept the terms of service on his behalf and were rejecting the class action waiver on their own account.

Nothing was ever argued. The companies had their response deadline moved from February 28 to March 28, 2022, telling Judge Maxine M. Chesney in a signed stipulation that the two sides were discussing an early resolution and wanted room to explore it before running up motion costs. On March 28, the day the extension ran out, Escobar dismissed with prejudice, which is the form a plaintiff uses when his own claim is over for good. The proposed class of Californians got nothing out of it, and no court has said whether a teaser profile counts as an advertisement.

We're linking a docket mirror that hosts no filings of its own, not the complaint, because the copy in the free court archives shows a screenshot of Escobar's own listing with his addresses and phone numbers readable. That mirror stops in January 2022, so the dismissal has its own link.

• Docket, entry by entry ->
• The dismissal entry, March 28, 2022 ->
• The stipulation describing the settlement talks (PDF) ->

Bursor & Fisher brought this nearly four years before the Colorado cell-number case above, and the target was the free preview rather than the phone numbers. Clarence Pittman, an Ohio resident who had never been a customer, said the previews used his name, age, city and relatives' names to advertise a $26.89-a-month subscription, and that Ohio's Right of Publicity statute bars using anyone's persona for a commercial purpose without written consent. He asked to speak for every Ohio resident who had turned up in one of those previews, a group the complaint put in the millions.

One argument in it is worth keeping whatever became of the case. BeenVerified could run the same business inside the statute, the complaint said, by showing the names it finds and stopping there, rather than dressing a person's details up as a pitch for something else.

It never got tested. BeenVerified's lawyers asked Judge Andrew L. Carter Jr. on June 16, 2021 for permission to move to dismiss. He gave Pittman until June 21 to answer that request, and on June 18 Pittman dropped the case instead, without prejudice and without costs. No response to the complaint was ever filed and nothing in it was decided.

Same handling as Byer above. The docket link is a mirror with no filings attached, because the complaint sitting in the free archives reproduces Pittman's own BeenVerified listing whole, phone numbers, street addresses and relatives included.

• Docket, entry by entry ->

This one goes at the line BeenVerified draws around itself. Its terms tell buyers the reports aren't consumer reports and can't decide who gets hired, and this suit says that's exactly what one of them did. By his account he applied for a job in October 2020, signed the paperwork letting the employer pull a background check, and the employer bought that check from BeenVerified. What came back was inaccurate, the complaint says, and the employer told him the error weighed heavily in turning him down. We're not repeating what the report got wrong about him. What earns this case a place here is the shape of the claim, that a BeenVerified report got as far as a hiring decision and that the person in it says what the buyer read was wrong. Neither half was ever tested.

So the complaint called BeenVerified a consumer reporting agency to its face and said it broke the FCRA's requirement that an agency use reasonable procedures to get a report right, with libel and a New York deceptive practices claim stacked behind that in case the FCRA turned out not to reach.

The company never answered it. BeenVerified pushed the first conference back, filed a pre-motion letter on April 12, 2021, and two weeks later both sides told Judge P. Kevin Castel at that conference they were settling. He closed the case the same day on the standard order that lets either side reopen within thirty days if the deal falls apart. Nobody did. The terms were never filed, so the court kept no power to enforce them and there's no public record of what the plaintiff got.

The docket link here is the same kind of mirror, chosen for the same reason. The complaint carries personal detail about the plaintiff that this page has no business handing on, while the order that closed the case carries none, so that one is linked directly.

• Docket, entry by entry ->
• The order closing the case on the settlement (PDF) ->

The plaintiff alleged that BeenVerified used her name in dynamic keyword-insertion ads ("We found [name]") to advertise paid subscriptions, in violation of the Illinois Right of Publicity Act. Judge Manish S. Shah dismissed the complaint in August 2017, ruling that "name alone" isn't necessarily enough to identify a specific individual under IRPA. Because many people share the same name, the ads didn't point to this particular Nicole Vinci. The same order dismissed matching complaints against Spokeo and Instant Checkmate and let Intelius out for lack of personal jurisdiction. Her amended complaint was dismissed on May 21, 2018, and the case closed with judgment entered.

• GovInfo - dismissal order (PDF) ->
• CourtListener docket ->

Privacy services company Abine filed an FTC complaint against BeenVerified in 2012 alleging that consumers who had used BeenVerified's own opt-out flow were finding their information re-published on the site afterward. The complaint did not result in a public FTC enforcement action against BeenVerified, but it is an early documented account of the "opt-out doesn't actually keep you off" pattern that has since become a focus of CCPA / Delete Act enforcement.

• PR Newswire - 2012 FTC complaint announcement ->