DOJ arrests Oxygen Forensics CEO for concealing Russian ownership
Wire fraud charges target a scheme that netted over $2 million in DHS and DOD contracts after 2022 sanctions made the true ownership structure radioactive.
TL;DR
DOJ arrested Oxygen Forensics CEO Lee Reiber in Idaho and Russian co-owner Oleg Davydov in London on wire fraud conspiracy charges. The criminal complaint alleges the phone-forensics company concealed that five Russian nationals controlled it while selling to the Secret Service, Homeland Security Investigations, the DHS inspector general, and DOD. After the U.S. expanded Russia sanctions in 2022, Reiber was installed as CEO and the Russian owners were removed from public filings, but internal emails show the shareholders continued calling "fateful decisions." Government procurement officials told investigators they wouldn't have awarded or renewed contracts had they known the company was Russian-owned. Access Now's Natalia Krapiva called the timing "both a national security and a human rights scandal."
The complaint doesn't mince words about what changed after sanctions hit. Before 2022, Oxygen Forensics could acknowledge its Russian ownership openly. After the U.S. expanded Russia sanctions following the invasion of Ukraine, that ownership became a disqualifier for the government contracts Oxygen depended on. So the company, according to DOJ, made it disappear, installing Reiber as CEO and scrubbing the five Russian shareholders from public corporate filings while they continued controlling the business from behind the curtain.
An unnamed co-conspirator spelled out the arrangement in an email cited in the complaint: "fateful decisions will be made by" the five shareholders, including Davydov. Meanwhile, Reiber was telling the National Computer Forensics Institute as recently as February 2025 that Oxygen was U.S.-owned.
The dollars aren't enormous ($2 million since March 2022) but the customer list is concentrated where it hurts. Secret Service. Homeland Security Investigations. DHS OIG. DOD. These aren't administrative software licenses; they're forensic tools used to extract data from phones. The same software, developed by the same team, was sold by Oxygen Russia to customers the complaint identifies as including the Russian Federal Security Service. When Elcomsoft accused Oxygen of reverse-engineering its code in 2023, Reiber found himself boxed in: answering the charge truthfully meant admitting the U.S. and Russian entities sold identical products built by identical people under identical ownership.
What the complaint doesn't allege, and why that matters
DOJ went out of its way to state that the software contained no malicious code and wasn't used to gain unauthorized access to customer systems. That's a meaningful carve-out. It means the government isn't arguing the tools themselves were compromised, the fraud was in who got paid. That distinction shapes the remedy: this looks more like a False Claims Act-adjacent procurement fraud than a supply-chain sabotage case.
The procurement question agencies now face
Government procurement officials told investigators they wouldn't have awarded or renewed contracts had they known about the Russian ownership. That's the materiality hook, and it's what opens the door to contract rescission. Whether DOJ pursues clawback of the $2 million or refers the matter for suspension and debarment remains an open question, but those steps tend to follow charges like these.
Krapiva, whose organization has tracked this company for years, framed the delay as the scandal: the same technology used in U.S. investigations was being deployed inside Russia by the FSB. She called on the U.S. and over 100 governments using the software to sever ties, impose sanctions, and investigate how Russian-built forensic tools sat inside sensitive law enforcement operations. The DOJ complaint, for its part, has now confirmed what civil society argued all along.
Published ·Deep Fathom