US firm Oxygen Forensics, which the US Department of Justice has accused of concealing its ties to Russia, sold its services to European law enforcement agencies. The company develops and sells software to law enforcement that can extract and analyse information from smartphones and computers.
This was reported by Politico.eu.
According to documents reviewed by Politico, Hungarian police signed a contract with Oxygen Forensics in December 2024 worth 10.14 million Hungarian forints (€27,000), which ran until December 2025.
The public prosecutor’s office in the Italian city of Sassari listed Oxygen Forensics among approved systems that judicial police may use to extract and analyse data from mobile devices.
In Spain, police used Oxygen Forensics software for digital analysis of WhatsApp on Android and Apple smartphones.
Law enforcement agencies in Romania and Latvia also purchased Oxygen Forensics software in September 2026. Earlier, Oxygen products were bought by national police agencies across Europe, including Germany, Spain, Italy and Poland.
The company, which has Russian roots, was also involved in the EVIDENCE project (European Information Data Exchange System for Courts and Evidence), which received more than €1.9 million in EU funding between 2014 and 2016. Oxygen Forensics was consulted on how Europe could better process and share digital evidence in criminal cases. This enabled the company to enter a broader network that included the EU police agency Europol, the judicial co-operation agency Eurojust, and the digital forensics unit of the European Anti-Fraud Office.
Another EU project involving Oxygen Forensics — INSPECTr — was funded under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme. The project aimed to help EU law enforcement collect and analyse digital evidence gathered using different tools. On its own now-inactive website, Oxygen Forensics listed the European Commission as a client.
Last week, the head of Oxygen Forensics was detained in the United States — US citizen Lee Reiber. The company’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Russian national Oleg Davydov, was detained at London Heathrow Airport before a flight to Istanbul.
According to US prosecutors, the company concealed from US government agencies that it is owned and run by Russians, and that its software is developed in Russia. Five Russians who own Oxygen Forensics also controlled the Russian subsidiary MKO Systems, which sold the same core technology to Russia’s Federal Security Service and the Russian Interior Ministry.
The US Department of Justice said Oxygen Forensics had been in contact with the US Department of Defense and several units of the Department of Homeland Security, including the Secret Service, its digital forensics training institute, Homeland Security Investigations, and the department’s internal oversight body.
Natalia Krapiva, senior legal counsel at digital rights group Access Now, told Politico that civil society organisations had been warning European authorities for years about Oxygen Forensics’ links to Russians.
“If software made in Russia — developed for the FSB and the Investigative Committee — was indeed used to work with the European Commission’s criminal evidence database, this creates a serious likelihood that confidential information was compromised and that Russian authorities gained access to it,” she said. “We urge the EU and every government using these tools to suspend their use and thoroughly investigate how a Russian company spent a decade embedded in Western law enforcement agencies.”