West London man jailed for UK's largest fake vinyl seizure

A 40-year-old man from west London has been jailed for three years and six months for pressing and selling counterfeit vinyl records.

Rehan Ahmed was sentenced at Inner London Crown Court after pleading guilty to two charges of breach of artists' copyright and acquiring and using criminal property, which covers handling money or goods known to come from crime BBC. Copyright, the legal right that controls who can copy and sell a recording, sits at the centre of the case.

Police raided Ahmed's Phoenix of Vinyl warehouse in 2024 and found 15,000 bootleg LPs spanning 108 different artists Pitchfork. The seizure has been described by police as the largest stash of counterfeit vinyl in UK history. The records included albums by Taylor Swift, Drake, Rihanna, Bad Bunny, the Beatles and Ed Sheeran.

Investigators said Ahmed had run the pressing-and-selling operation for seven years. Sales from the fake records totalled £2,743,000, about $3.67 million. That figure counts what buyers paid, not profit after costs.

The court heard Ahmed had been issued with a legal cease and desist order in 2017 but kept printing vinyl. A cease and desist order is a formal demand to stop an activity claimed to break the law. He continued for another seven years until the warehouse raid.

Ahmed, of Cranleigh Gardens, Southall, was investigated by the City of London Police City of London Police. He is a father of three.

What makes this stand out is the scale and the format. Vinyl pays artists, labels and publishers through licensed sales. Every unlicensed copy sold diverts money from that chain and leaves the buyer with a record made outside quality control. For fans, this means a fake LP can look right in its sleeve and still sound wrong on the turntable.