Excellent question!! I hope to find some buried treasure some day. First of all:
If you find a very valuable cache, everybody and their brother will want to know about it.
The land owner, the government, the neighbors, everybody.
So the first rule to follow is to make sure no one, that is, no one, finds out about your newfound treasure. This can be a lot harder than you might think. Most locals will try to keep one eye on a treasure hunter, just in case they find something of value. So make sure to remove your treasure in absolute secrecy. Preferably under the cover of darkness. And be as quiet as you can about it. Try to make sure that no one but yourself knows about the cache. Exciting as it may be, tell no one.
Make sure you are not spotted, or followed after removing a treasure cache. This is overkill action for just a jar of coins from an attic. But if you find a REAL big treasure, you must be most secretive. Plan in advance how and where you will go upon removing the cache.
If you have successfully removed the treasure in secrecy, the next question is, now what?
This is a bigger problem than most people might think. We all think about how exciting it would be to find a big treasure. We don't think too much about how we would handle it. Actually, keeping a large treasure can be harder than finding it in the first place! Most of you probably know about treasure recovery teams that find spanish galleons with massive treasure. All of these teams have had run-ins and long legal problems with the governments once it becomes known that they have found valuable treasure. Finding a very valuable treasure can become a real pain in the 3$@.
If you are the type that doesn't mind sharing, or even giving your treasure to the various "interested parties", then you don't have any problem. Just let the proper authorities know what you have found.
But if you want to keep most, if not all of your treasure, you can't let anyone, especially the authorities know about it.
So what would you do with it? Most important, of course, is that it be kept in a secret and secure place. (Just like the place you pulled it from!) You should not keep it at your home-too much of a temptation for robbery if anyone should suspect anything.
My first thought is to put it in a bank safe deposit box. But here in the U.S., this is a very poor action. Here in the U.S., all contents of a safe deposit box must be reported to the bank.
The banks are part of the federal reserve system, so you would be reporting your treasure to the government.
I think that one of the best things to do with real treasure is to deposit it in a Swiss bank account in a foreign country. (If you can get it there without being detected, a tall order, indeed.)
At any rate, I think you need to liquidate any large treasure. I would look into selling it on sites such as ebay. You would have to do it gradually, over time, as there are always watchdogs looking for valuable caches. Am I being too paranoid? :-)
But even if I found only a small cache, I would definitley liquidate it as soon as possible.
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