A £2.5MILLION international fake clothes racket operating from the back streets of Blackburn has been smashed, trading standards officials said today.

Officers from Blackburn with Darwen Council have raided three addresses and a garage in streets off Shear Brow, Blackburn, after being tipped off that large amounts of clothing were being sent there.

Two thousand copies of clothes by Burberry, Hugo Boss, Stone Island, Armani and Rockport -- worth £168,000 if bought at full price -- were seized.

Fifty thousand fake labels, which, if sewn on to clothes, would have created counterfeit designer garments worth more than £2.5million, were also recovered.

The clothes included jeans, jackets, hats, scarves and tops, which officials believe were destined to be sold in pubs and car boot sales across East Lancashire and further afield.

Three men were arrested by police, who joined in the raid with Trading Standards, and are now on bail pending further inquiries. Chief Trading Standards Officer Chris Allen said: "We now need to contact all the firms and get them to check that the clothes we have seized are fake, although we are confident they are.

"As copies go, these were pretty good ones. They even had the correct swingtags and some of the jackets came packaged up as if they were the real thing."

It is the first large-scale raid the council has carried out since 1998, when Lancashire's counterfeiting racket was at its peak.

Then, Lancashire's counterfeiters were costing designer firms £4million a year but a series of raids on factories in Blackburn uncovered thousands of pairs of jeans.

Mr Allen added: "The scene has been very quiet since then but it is obviously still very much alive.

"Then, it was a case of the jeans being made in Lancashire then sold off wherever.

"Now it appears that the clothes are shipped in from Asia, tags sewn on and then sold off. The fakers seem to have changed premises, with terraced houses being used instead.

"The documents we seized indicated that these garments were not only meant for East Lancashire, but for the country as a whole.

"One of the houses had a garage where the labels were being sewn on. This is a real success for us."

In 1998, Lancashire Trading Standards seized 2,000 pairs of fake jeans and 400,000 fake rivets and buttons from a factory in Great Harwood. The goods had a street value of £2.6million.

A Trading Standards raid at an Accrington sock factory resulted in the seizure of 43,000 pairs of fake sports socks with a street value of nearly £250,000.

In 2000, a campaign to encourage people to stop buying fakes was launched, which pointed out the effects it had on legal jobs and the economy.

Lancashire County Council's Trading Standards today said that counterfeiting was still a problem, especially with technical items such as CDs and videos.