The Russian-American company Oxygen Forensics — which, as The Insider reported last week, supplied software to both U.S. and Russian security agencies — also worked with law enforcement bodies in the European Union, according to Politico. Documents reviewed by the outlet indicate that Oxygen Forensics software was used in at least two EU-funded projects aimed at improving the collection, processing, and sharing of electronic data in criminal investigations.
The first EU project, EVIDENCE (the European Informatics Data Exchange Framework for Courts and Evidence) ran from March 2014 to October 2016 and listed Oxygen Forensics among the companies consulted on handling digital evidence. The second, INSPECTr, operated from September 2019 to February 2023 — one year after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. As part of that project, software was developed to process data extracted using Oxygen Forensics products, though an unnamed European Commission representative told Politico that Oxygen Forensics did not receive EU funding directly.
Meanwhile, French investigative outlet Disclose found that Oxygen Forensics surveillance software was supplied to Moroccan authorities under an EU-funded program aimed at strengthening border security in the Maghreb.
Hungarian procurement records show that in December 2024, Hungarian police signed a contract with Oxygen Forensics worth 10.14 million forints (27,000 euros) that ran through December 2025. An April 2026 document from prosecutors in Sassari, Sardinia, listed Oxygen Forensics products among the programs judicial police officers could use to extract and analyze data from mobile devices.
Law enforcement agencies in Germany, Spain, Italy, and Poland also purchased the company’s software, and authorities in Romania and Latvia were still buying it as late as this month — September 2026.
Oxygen Forensics CEO Lee Reiber, a U.S. citizen, was arrested in Idaho on Sept. 20. The same day, British authorities detained the company’s chief technology officer and co-founder, Russian citizen Oleg Davydov, at London Heathrow airport at the request of U.S. authorities. The executives are accused of concealing that the company was controlled by Russian citizens and that its software was developed in Russia.
Oxygen was founded in 2000 by programmers Oleg Fyodorov and Oleg Davydov. They initially focused only on foreign markets, but in 2007 they launched a Russian version of the product called “Mobile Forensic Expert” (“Mobilny Kriminalist”). Its main purpose is to extract data from mobile phones. According to U.S. prosecutors, the American company Oxygen Forensics was incorporated in Virginia in 2013.
The company sold software to the Pentagon and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). As The Insider previously reported, its software was also supplied to Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, which used it to extract data from locked smartphones belonging to Russian journalists and activists including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, who was sentenced to 6.5 years in prison for “spreading false information” about the Russian army in July 2024.
Kurmasheva was subsequently released alongside former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, and multiple others in a 26-person prisoner exchange between Russia and the West on Aug. 1, 2024.
