A court has sentenced Rehan Ahmed, 55, of Southall in west London, to three and a half years in prison for making and selling counterfeit vinyl records. Tom’s Hardware reports that investigators traced the operation back to 2017, and that it brought in £2.7 million over that time.
Ahmed’s company, Phoenix of Vinyl, turned out thousands of unlicensed records featuring The Beatles, Taylor Swift, Coldplay, Kendrick Lamar and other major artists. It came to light in 2024 after a test purchase. A representative of the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the UK record industry’s trade body, bought a record from the company, and it proved to be fake.
City of London Police then raided the site and found 2,791 counterfeit records by 108 artists. According to police, it’s the largest haul of fake vinyl ever seized in the UK.
Ahmed wasn’t just reselling other people’s fakes — he was making them himself. Officers found four record presses around 70 years old, roughly 3,000 metal stampers used to press the discs, and thousands of sleeves and labels.
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The operation thrived on a fresh wave of interest in physical music formats. Brits bought 7.6 million vinyl records in 2025, up 13.3% from a year earlier. Vinyl sales in the UK have now grown for 18 years straight, with revenue up 19.9% to £174.7 million. The revival isn’t limited to vinyl, either: in the US, CD sales climbed sharply in the first half of 2026.
The counterfeit market is growing alongside the legitimate one. Over the past two years, the BPI has taken part in 43 raids linked to the production and distribution of fake records and CDs. Those operations seized around 600,000 items with an estimated value of up to £8 million. In June, another British man received a suspended sentence for selling bootleg CDs of unauthorized remixes of other artists’ tracks.
