Rehan Ahmed, 40, has been sentenced to three years and six months in a UK prison for producing the largest cache of counterfeit vinyl records in the country’s history. Ahmed had been pressing the records for seven years before his Phoenix of Vinyl warehouse was raided by authorities in 2024; there, they found bootlegs of 100 different artists’ work. Albums from The Beatles to Bad Bunny were found in Ahmed’s collection, which also held titles from Taylor Swift, Drake, Rihanna, and Ed Sheeran. Ahmed pleaded guilty to two charges of breach of copyright and of acquiring and using criminal property. He had generated $3,667,921.39 in counterfeit sales by the time he was apprehended that year; he had already been issued a cease and desist order in 2017, to no avail.
Ahmed’s factory was first raided after members of the British Phonographic Industry made a test purchase from its premises and discovered evidence of counterfeit. He was using four 70-year-old vinyl presses to create the records, 15,000 of which police discovered at his factory.
Peter Ratcliffe, who directs content protection at BPI, estimated that “tens of millions of pounds” had been taken from their rightful earners thanks to Ahmed’s efforts. “With music on physical formats enjoying a resurgence, the market in counterfeit records has unfortunately also been growing as criminals cash in at the expense of creators and fans,” he said. “This doesn’t just impact the legal music economy and everyone that works and invests in it—it also affects every one of us as citizens who fall victim to other forms of criminality that it funds.”
A recent Guardian article stated that UK vinyl sales increased by 13.3% in 2025, capping off 18 years of consistent growth. At the same time, the industry’s US component reached over $1 billion in value for the first time in 40 years. Per the article, a “growing underground industry” has arisen to illicitly satisfy the burgeoning demand for vinyl tracks. Artists who rarely release vinyl copies, like Frank Ocean, are particularly susceptible to fakery.
While Ahmed’s warehouse was the largest operation yet seen by the force, it was in no way the first and will not be the last. “We’re going to find more,” Ratliffe said in the article, “and I think we’re going to have bigger finds as well. Just the industrial scale now and the increased popularity of vinyl … It’s all going to lead to very big seizures.”
