Guangzhou police led an operation with police in Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Hunan and Guangxi provinces that in the past week busted a criminal gang that was producing, packaging and distributing fake toothpaste for hotels, Nandu Daily reports.

The gang was using 22 locations to produce the mini toothpaste and 125 people were arrested on suspicion of being part of it. Among them, 31 are currently under criminal detention. Police say the criminal gang did over 20 million yuan of business.

The alarm was first raised in early June by the food and drugs department of the Guangzhou Public Security Bureau. They discovered that warehouses in Baiyun District’s Taihe Village and Longcun Village were producing toiletries without a license.

They later discovered that the warehouse on 22 Yunmei Street, run by a man named Mr. He, had been operating illegally since January 2011. They also discovered that he had been distributing his ware to five provinces, which sparked the nationwide investigation.

It then emerged that Mr. He was using his contacts in other provinces to distribute fake tubes of mini toothpaste to hotels around the nation. He and his accomplices now face jail time.

In 2011, Stan Abrams of China Hearsay kindly reminded China watchers not to use the words fake and counterfeit interchangeably. However, it appears that this gang was guilty of distributing both fake and counterfeit products.