theguardian.com
Deep cuts: how one Londoner’s fake vinyl empire sheds light on ‘industrial scale’ fraud
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. Continue reading...
![[SCENE: The court of Henry VIII. The King sits on his throne. An ADVISOR approaches him.]
ADVISOR: Your majesty, the kingdom is bankrupt!
HENRY VIII: Damn this costly war...
ADVISOR: Not the war, sir. Ir’s your jester subscriptions.
HENRY VIII: But they’re only 7 groats 95 a month!
ADVISOR: They really add up, your highness
ADVISOR: The palace doth o’erflow with well-reviewed jesters you’ve never even watched
[Show lots of jesters sitting round, bored]
HENRY VIII: Well there’s just so many ‘unmissable jesters’ these days...
HENRY VIII: I always think, I must watch that new jester everyone’s talking about... but then I just end up watching repeats of Johnny Arse
[Show a clearly lowbrow jester, baring his buttocks and shouting “JOHNNY ARRRSE!”]
ADVISOR: We even found an unopened jester-by-post from 1509!
[Show a skeleton in a box with ‘LoveJester’, like the LoveFilm logo, on the side]
ADVISOR: So - let’s cancel some subscriptions:
ADVISOR: NowJester?
HENRY VIII: I’m not missing Game of Jesters
[Ends]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:4m3we4apbjayclzcnhwe3pfp/bafkreict7cb5pwr5izjpxmn3xkzb2ua5pm2nwgjggn5ublamwvmtjifwpa)
