The man who ran Britain’s biggest counterfeit vinyl operation has been sentenced to three and a half years in prison.
Over the last 10 years, Rehan Ahmed built up an impressive empire. Operating under the names Phoenix Of Vinyl and Paragon Vinyl, Ahmed made nearly £3.6 million selling his wares to record shops and through eBay and Discogs. When police raided his warehouse in 2024, they found 15,000 pieces of vinyl.
Of course, there is a long (and some would say legitimate) history of bootleg vinyl – going back to the ’60s and ’70s when illicit live recordings of artists would find their way onto the market. What Ahmed was doing was altogether different in that he was producing fake copies of officially released albums.
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In a way he was filling a gap in the market. We all know about the revival of vinyl over the last fifteen years. What’s less talked about is the high price of vinyl – you’re lucky to get change from £40 these days for a new album – and how its perceived position as a ‘luxury’ format has suppressed demand, creating an opportunity for the likes of Ahmed to sell cheaper knock-off vinyl for the many cash-strapped folk in a cost of living crisis.
Then there is the baffling decision of artists such as Frank Ocean not to produce vinyl editions of their immensely popular albums at all. Fake copies of Ocean’s critically-acclaimed Channel Orange and Blonde albums regularly turn up on sites such as Discogs. When, belatedly, a legitimate vinyl Channel Orange was released in 2025 it sold out in days.
Whatever the reasons behind Ahmed’s operation, it’s still very much illegal. In a statement, Peter Ratcliffe, the Director of Content Protection at the BPI said: “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 added: “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.”
And Ratcliffe is convinced there are other Ahmeds out there. Speaking to the Guardian, he estimated there were at least ten other large-scale counterfeiting operations in the UK: “We’re going to find more, 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.”
