A man has been sentenced to over three years in prison following an investigation by London police that uncovered a counterfeit vinyl operation valued at £1 million ($1.34 million).
On Friday (Sept. 19), Rehan Ahmed, 40, of Southall, west London, was found guilty at the Inner London Crown Court for breaches of artists’ copyright and acquiring and using criminal property. Ahmed received two years and eight months for the copyright breaches and three and a half years for the criminal property charge. Judge Darren Reed ruled that the sentences will run concurrently.
Ahmed led an operation that produced fraudulent vinyl copies of albums by Taylor Swift, Coldplay and Kendrick Lamar among others. Between 2017 and 2024, Ahmed generated an estimated £2,743,000 in profit from the operation, as revealed by the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) at the City of London Police.
The counterfeit records were produced and distributed from a unit in Acton, west London, operating under the name “Phoenix of Vinyl.” Search warrants executed in February 2024 led to the seizure of 2,791 vinyl records alongside lacquers and pressing equipment. The illicit goods were sold on online marketplaces such as eBay and Discogs, infringing on the copyrights of 108 artists.
The case was referred to PIPCU by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) and represents the largest seizure of its kind in the U.K. Officers seized 18 tonnes of evidence, including four vinyl pressing machines — each roughly 70 years old — along with thousands of sleeves and centre labels.
The vinyl market continues to play a growing part in music consumption in the U.K., with 7.6m units sold in 2025, as per the BPI. That marks an increase of 13.3% year on year, and is the 18th consecutive year of growth since 2008.
Peter Ratcliffe, the BPI’s director of content protection, said: “This conviction is hugely significant, and we thank our partners in this investigation, PIPCU and our label members, for their valued efforts over many months to bring about this welcome outcome. Sadly, it won’t return the tens of millions of pounds that we estimate have been leeched from artists, the record labels that support them, and the retail community that sells their music, but at least this major criminal operation has now been closed down and it sends a clear signal to other counterfeiters who are exploiting music that we are coming after them.”
