A Justice Department indictment has spotlighted Oxygen Forensics, a company run by Russian nationals, alleging it concealed Russian ownership while selling its digital forensics tools to U.S. agencies and European customers for years. The DOJ claims CEO Lee Reiber and co-founder Oleg Davydov hid that Oxygen was owned and controlled by Russians and that its software was developed in Russia, misrepresenting the company’s origins to win government contracts.
The case follows broader scrutiny of Oxygen’s activities beyond the United States, including collaboration with European law enforcement on evidence-handling initiatives.
European context shows Oxygen’s involvement with two EU-funded projects that aimed to improve cross-system digital investigations. The EVIDENCE project (2014–2016) received over €1.9 million in EU funding and included participation from Europol, Eurojust and the European Anti-Fraud Office’s digital forensics unit, though Oxygen was not a formal consortium member.
The INSPECTr project, backed under Horizon 2020 and running until 2023, developed software to integrate Oxygen-generated data with other investigative systems. While the European Commission said Oxygen was not directly funded by the EU, it was reportedly consulted on projects dealing with digital evidence and investigative technology.
Authorities in several EU countries—Germany, Spain, Italy, Poland, Romania, Latvia, and Hungary—had purchases or accreditations for Oxygen’s products, with some connections extending to training programmes for Moroccan authorities funded by the EU. The disclosures prompted Romania to pause use of Oxygen’s tools, and civil society voices warned of potential risks to sensitive data exposed to Russian-controlled access.