In the United States, executives of Oxygen Forensics — a company that develops software for recovering and analysing data from smartphones and other devices and supplies it to US government agencies — have been detained.
According to US prosecutors, the company concealed from US government bodies that it was owned and run by Russians, and that its software was developed in Russia.
This was reported by The New York Post.
Oxygen Forensics CEO Lee Reiber, a 55-year-old American, was detained in Idaho, while the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer, 52-year-old Russian national Oleg Davidov, was detained at London Heathrow Airport before a flight to Istanbul.
Oxygen Forensics was owned by five Russians through a Cyprus-registered holding company, prosecutors say. The same five individuals owned the Russian company MKO-Systems, which Davidov founded in 2000. Its developers are based in Russia and, according to investigators, its clients included the FSB, the Investigative Committee and Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs.
US federal prosecutors said that Oxygen Forensics CEO Lee Reiber tried to conceal his company’s ties to Russia while offering its software to US government agencies.
Oxygen Forensics supplies technology used for “recovering, preserving and analysing electronic data from digital devices”. Oxygen Forensics software was purchased by the US Department of Defense, the Secret Service and units of the Department of Homeland Security. In September 2024, the National Computer Forensics Institute at the Secret Service signed a five-year contract with the company.
Prosecutors allege that the Russians used Reiber as the American face of the company, concealing its affiliation with the Russian Federation. At the same time, they “continued to make key decisions and set Reiber’s compensation, overruled his decisions on payments, and had signatory authority on the company’s bank accounts”.
Reiber nevertheless certified to the US Department of Defense in July 2024 that “no foreign person has the right to control the appointment of the company’s directors or managers or to direct its other decisions or activities”.
And in March 2026, Oxygen Forensics’ CEO assured the Department of Homeland Security “that no Russian had been involved in developing the software and that no one in Russia had access to the environment in which it was created”.