Editing Beale ciphers (section)

==Search attempts==
Despite the Beale Papers' unproven veracity, treasure hunters have not been deterred from trying to find the vault. The "information" that there is buried treasure in Bedford County has stimulated many expeditions with shovels, and other implements of discovery, looking for likely spots.{{citation needed|date=April 2024}} For more than a hundred years, people have been arrested for trespassing and unauthorized digging; some of them in groups as in the case of people from Pennsylvania in the 1990s.<ref name=Singh />

Several digs were completed at the top of Porter's Mountain, one in the late 1980s with the land owner's permission as long as any treasure found was split 50/50. However, the treasure hunters found only [[American Civil War|Civil War]] artifacts. As the value of these artifacts paid for time and equipment rental, the expedition broke even.<ref name=Singh />