According to the case materials, the 55-year-old CEO of Oxygen Forensics, Lee Reiber, was detained in Idaho on September 20 and then released on bail by the court. The 52-year-old co-founder and CTO of the company, Oleg Davydov, was detained the same day at London’s Heathrow Airport in the United Kingdom when he was preparing to fly to Istanbul; the U.S. intends to seek his extradition.
The U.S. prosecutor’s office says that Reiber told U.S. authorities that Virginia-based Oxygen Forensics was not owned or controlled by foreigners. According to the prosecution, in reality five Russian citizens, including Davydov, owned stakes or took part in management through a holding company in Cyprus, and Reiber also lied that Oxygen Forensics software was developed in the U.S., not in Russia.
The California court, where the case will be heard, ordered the freezing of the company’s accounts and more than 50 domains belonging to it. According to court documents, no later than March 2022 Reiber, Davydov, and others conspired to obtain contracts from federal agencies. The company’s software is used to recover, preserve, and analyze data from digital devices while keeping the original files unchanged.
Oxygen Forensics was founded in Virginia in 2013 with the participation of Moscow native Davydov, and Reiber joined the company two years later. In March 2022, Reiber became CEO, president, and chairman of the board, and, according to the prosecutor’s office, it was then that the company decided to conceal information about Russian owners and removed them from corporate documents.
The Insider writes that Oxygen Forensics supplied software that made it possible to access the contents of locked phones not only to the Pentagon, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and U.S. homeland security agencies, but also to the FSB. The publication also claims that this program was used to extract data from the iPhone of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty journalist Alsu Kurmasheva.
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