CBC reports on a vaction to the Dominican Republic ....

That's when … we both realized that this was getting out of control, that this was not just a misunderstanding," said Dawn Sinnott, who began yelling for help.

"You think you're in big trouble now?" Dawn Sinnott recalls a man identifying himself as an employee telling them. He then told them, she said, "You just disturbed the peace. I'm going to have you arrested.… You're going to prison forever."

Instead of a marked police vehicle, though, a white pickup truck arrived to take the Sinnotts away. They were taken to a building with cells, although they were later told the building is used by tourism security and not the actual police.

The Sinnotts said they were astonished when — at one point during the interrogation — the man who accused them of stealing his cellphone answered a cellphone he was carrying. The man said the cellphone he was using belonged to someone else.

"That's when it stopped being about the cellphone," Dawn Sinnott said.

"He said, 'If you just give us the money, you can go,'" Andrew Sinnott said. "I didn't have the [cash] — I didn't even have a room key."

The whole thing is worth a read and reminds me of my brother's friend who, upon graduation from medical school, headed to Mexico for vacation, which vacation ended when the police stuck a gun in his girlfriends face and made hime pay-up. They were going to charge him with some nonsense charge.