Fake Taylor Swift and Rihanna vinyl lands a British bootlegger in prison

A man who spent seven years pressing counterfeit copies of records by Taylor Swift, Rihanna and more than a hundred other artists has been sentenced to three years and six months in prison. Rehan Ahmed, 40, ran the operation from a warehouse trading as Phoenix of Vinyl and, according to Consequence, also as Paragon Music, and British police describe the haul recovered from it as the largest seizure of fake vinyl in the country's history.

The investigation began with a test purchase. Representatives of the British Phonographic Industry bought a record from the warehouse, determined it was a fake, and handed it to police. City of London Police raided the site in February 2024 and eventually carried 18 metric tons of evidence out of it.

What they found inside says as much as the sentence does. EDM.com reports four pressing machines each roughly 70 years old, about 3,000 metal stampers, the moulds that cut a record's grooves, and thousands of sleeves and centre labels. The Guardian described the site as a squalid mess, with chemicals stored in fridges next to cans of lager and paperwork scattered across the floor. AllHipHop reports that three or four workers ran the presses at night, pressing from existing records rather than from original masters, with only the labels and sleeves outsourced to a printer in Gravesend, Kent.

The outlets do not agree on scale, and the gap is large enough to matter. Pitchfork, Consequence and AllHipHop all put the seizure at 15,000 bootleg LPs covering 108 artists; EDM.com puts the count at 2,791 records across the same 108 artists. The artist count is consistent, the disc count is not, and neither figure has been reconciled in any of the four reports. The named artists overlap heavily and differ at the edges too: Ariana Grande, Bad Bunny, Beyonce, Adele, Kendrick Lamar, Drake, Kanye West, Coldplay, De La Soul, Frank Ocean, Ed Sheeran and the Beatles all appear across the accounts.

The money is the one number everybody agrees on. Ahmed took around £2.7 million, put at $3.6 million, selling through record shops, eBay and Discogs to buyers who believed they were getting legitimate pressings. He had been served a cease and desist order in 2017 and carried on regardless, which is the detail that turned this from a civil matter into a custodial sentence.

The crime exists because the format came back. UK vinyl sales rose 13.3 percent to 7.6 million units in 2025, and the US vinyl market passed $1 billion for the first time in four decades, with legitimate new releases routinely priced at £40 or more. That margin is what a counterfeiter is stealing, and it grew while enforcement stayed built for a shrinking market. The same economics are visible in CD revenue jumping almost 60 percent as vinyl growth slowed.

Detective Constable Daryl Fryatt of the force's intellectual property crime unit said Ahmed had exploited that revival at the expense of musicians, adding that the case "should send a clear message to anyone selling counterfeit vinyl, it is illegal and we will take action." Peter Ratcliffe, the British Phonographic Industry's director of content protection, welcomed the sentence while noting that "the market in counterfeit records has unfortunately also been growing as criminals cash in at the expense of creators and fans."

He is not describing a closed case. Sky News reports that at least 10 other counterfeit vinyl operations are under investigation in Britain. Physical bootlegging is being fought with raids and warrants while the digital side of the same problem moves towards network-level blocking, as a bill in Congress would order US providers to cut off piracy sites. Counterfeit merchandise is drawing the same response, with Live Nation's merch arm suing sellers over fake Nirvana and Bruno Mars goods. The pop hub carries the rest of the week.