World to tourists: 'Stop stealing everything!'

Here's another reason anything from a beach makes for a terrible holiday souvenir .

A U.S. tourist has been arrested for trying to bring home rocks and what he thought was debris from a beach in Turkey, Kazinform refers to CNN.

Jason Dement, 30, from Mississippi, was stopped and questioned at Antalya Airport when airport security found a piece of marble and what may be a piece of old masonry in his luggage.

The Turkish authorities charged him with trying to "smuggle historical artifacts," reported the Telegraph .

While his wife was allowed to leave the country, Dement now faces up to 12 years in prison.

Theft by travelers has been in the headlines various times over the last year. Travelers looking for unique souvenirs will stuff almost anything they can into their luggage from pieces of the Great Wall to live penguins.

At Boracay Island in the Philippines, the magnificent white beach sands are suffering "blatant extraction" at the hands of the kinds of tourists that give the rest of us a bad name.

Responding to the threat to its most valuable natural resource, local officials passed an ordinance last September that greatly toughened the existing law for being caught carting off sand or pebbles from the Philippines' top tourist destination.

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