By John Harris, The Guardian | Thousands of knock-off records worth a fortune are being seized in the UK by anti-counterfeit police stings. From 2017 onwards, Rehan Ahmed styled himself as a savvy business owner. But behind the facade of a successful entrepreneur lurked one stark fact: his empire was built on fakery.
On Friday, the man behind the biggest-ever UK case of producing fraudulent vinyl, who sold counterfeit copies of records by some of the world’s biggest artists including Taylor Swift, Coldplay and Kendrick Lamar, was jailed.
Ahmed, a 40-year-old father of three from Southall, west London, pleaded guilty to two charges of breach of artists’ copyright, and acquiring and using criminal property. On the first count, Judge Darren Reed sentenced him to two years and eight months in prison, while the more serious second charge led to a custodial penalty of three and a half years. The sentences will be served concurrently, meaning that the second will dictate the time Ahmed spends in prison.
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Read more about this bootleg operation here:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/sep/19/fake-vinyl-empire-sheds-light-industrial-scale-fraud
[Thanks to Alex Teitz for contributing this article! https://www.femmusic.com ]
