A former Idaho police officer built a tech company that sold phone-hacking software to the Secret Service, and prosecutors say the whole time it was secretly run by five Russians.
Story Snapshot
- Lee Reiber, a former Boise Police Department officer, ran Oxygen Forensics, a digital forensics firm used by U.S. agencies.
- Federal prosecutors say five Russian nationals actually owned and controlled the company through a Cyprus holding company.
- Oxygen sold software to the Secret Service’s forensics training center, the Defense Department, and the Department of Homeland Security.
- Reiber allegedly denied any Russian ties to undercover agents posing as Homeland Security officials as recently as March 2026.
A Cop-Turned-CEO Sold Government Tools Built With Russian Ties
Lee Reiber spent years wearing a badge in Boise before he became the face of Oxygen Forensics, a company that made software used to pull data off phones and computers. Federal prosecutors say that company was not the all-American operation it claimed to be. A criminal complaint alleges five Russian nationals, led by Oleg Davydov, owned and controlled the firm through a Cyprus-based holding company.
The software itself, prosecutors say, was written by developers working in Russia under Davydov’s direction. That detail matters because Oxygen wasn’t selling to some small private client. The company landed a five-year contract in September 2022 with the training center the Secret Service runs to teach police departments digital forensics, and it also sold tools to the Defense Department and Homeland Security.
Prosecutors allege Reiber told the government flat out that none of this was true. In a recorded March 2026 call with agents posing as Homeland Security officials, he denied that any Russian citizen owned, controlled, or helped build the software, and claimed those denials had held true since he took over as chief executive in 2022. He and another company officer reportedly repeated the same denial in writing to the Secret Service training center itself.
A Warning Email And A Wartime Cover Story
The complaint reportedly includes a message Reiber sent to Davydov and the other Russian owners, warning that if their ties to the company ever came out, it could “destroy this entire opportunity”. That line, if accurate, suggests the concealment wasn’t a misunderstanding. It reads like a business plan built on keeping Washington in the dark about who was really cashing the checks.
The timing lines up with Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Once Washington slapped sanctions on Russian-linked business ties, Reiber became chief executive and the Russian owners disappeared from public company filings. Prosecutors say that was cosmetic. They allege the same Russians kept real control over pay decisions and bank accounts even after their names vanished from the paperwork.
Oxygen didn’t just stay quiet. The company’s own website reportedly stated it had “no development presence in any restricted jurisdiction,” a public denial echoing what Reiber allegedly told federal officials directly. That statement is the strongest pushback surfacing publicly so far, but it comes from the same person and company facing the charges, not from an outside audit or independent record. Nothing here has been tested in court.
Why Government Contracts Rely On Vendors Policing Themselves
This case lands inside a real weak spot in federal contracting. Defense and security agencies have long leaned on companies to self-report foreign ownership, using disclosure forms rather than independent verification at the point of sale. Government watchdogs have flagged this gap before, noting contractors can conceal ownership details when registering for federal work because the system takes their word for it. New rules have been proposed to force deeper beneficial-ownership disclosure specifically because that trust has been abused.
An arrest is not a conviction, and the specific ownership charts, source code, and bank trails behind these allegations haven’t been made public in full yet. But the core claim, that a Secret Service vendor allegedly lied about who controlled the software behind U.S. security tools, is serious enough that Americans deserve a full public accounting. Sensitive contracts should never run on an honor system with an adversary nation on the other end of the paperwork.
🇺🇸🇷🇺🇬🇧🇹🇷🇨🇾 THE PENTAGON BOUGHT “AMERICAN” SOFTWARE. RUSSIAN DEVELOPERS WERE BEHIND IT.
The Pentagon, Secret Service and DHS spent roughly $2 million on digital-forensics software they believed was American-owned and American-developed. According to federal prosecutors, Russian… pic.twitter.com/30ilqVlgcR
— WW3finalboss (@WW3finalboss) September 27, 2026
Federal prosecutors will now have to prove their case in court, and Reiber and Davydov are entitled to defend themselves against it. What’s already clear is that the vetting process meant to catch exactly this kind of foreign influence either missed it for years or wasn’t built strong enough to catch it at all.
Sources:
nypost.com, nytimes.com, occrp.org, yahoo.com
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