The data privacy company Onerep.com bills itself as a Virginia-based service for helping people remove their personal information from almost 200 people-search websites.
An investigation into the history of onerep.com finds this company is operating out of Belarus and Cyprus, and that its founder has launched dozens of people-search services over the years.
Onerep also markets its service to companies seeking to offer their employees the ability to have their data continuously removed from people-search sites.
Customer case studies published on onerep.com state that it struck a deal to offer the service to employees of Permanente Medicine, which represents the doctors within the health insurance giant Kaiser Permanente.
A review of Onerep's domain registration records and that of its founder reveal a different side to this company.
Onerep.com says its founder and CEO is Dimitri Shelest from Minsk, Belarus, as does Shelest's profile on LinkedIn.
Nuwber.com is a people search service whose employees all appear to be from Belarus, and it is one of dozens of people-search companies that Onerep claims to target with its data-removal service.
A review of historic WHOIS records for onerep.com show it was registered for many years to a resident of Sioux Falls, SD for a completely unrelated site.
Around Sept. 2015 the domain switched from the registrar GoDaddy.com to eNom, and the registration records were hidden behind privacy protection services.
DomainTools indicates around this time onerep.com started using domain name servers from DNS provider constellix.com.
Listed on LinkedIn as a former product manager at OneRep.com between 2015 and 2018 is Dimitri Bukuyazau, who says their hometown is Warsaw, Poland.
While this LinkedIn profile does not mention Nuwber, a search on this name in Google turns up a 2017 blog post from privacyduck.com, which laid out a number of reasons to support a conclusion that OneRep and Nuwber.com were the same company.
PrivacyDuck's claims about how onerep.com appeared and behaved in the early days are not readily verifiable because the domain onerep.com has been completely excluded from the Wayback Machine at archive.org.
Still, Mr. Shelest's name, phone number and email also appear in the domain registration records for a truly dizzying number of country-specific people-search services, including pplcrwlr.
The same details appear in the WHOIS registration records for the now-defunct people-search sites waatpp.
KrebsOnSecurity also sought comment from onerep.com, which likewise has not responded to inquiries about its founder's many apparent conflicts of interest.
Max Anderson is chief growth officer at 360 Privacy, a legitimate privacy company that works to keep its clients' data off of more than 400 data broker and people-search sites.
Erson said it is concerning to see a direct link between between a data removal service and data broker websites.
Last week, KrebsOnSecurity published an analysis of the people-search data broker giant Radaris, whose consumer profiles are deep enough to rival those of far more guarded data broker resources available to U.S. police departments and other law enforcement personnel.
KrebsOnSecurity will continue investigating the history of various consumer data brokers and people-search providers.
This Cyber News was published on krebsonsecurity.com. Publication date: Thu, 14 Mar 2024 21:20:30 +0000