What was previously suspected to be foul play in the disappearance of 74-year-old Naiping Hou of Rancho Cucamonga has now been confirmed as such.
Hou was last seen in March. In the intervening months, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, which serves as the contract police department in Rancho Cucamonga, took the matter up as a missing person’s case. The Sentinel has confirmed that information turned up in the course of that investigation and other developments strongly indicates Hou was kidnapped.
That kidnapping, investigators have come to believe, was not undertaken for ransom, but rather to directly force Hou to turn money over to his abductors.
The case has been complicated by the initial 47-day delay in the Hou family’s report of Hou’s March 18 disappearance to authorities. Partially because the two family members closest to Hou, his wife and son, were not in California, the sheriff’s department was not alerted until May 4, 2025 to what in relatively short order was determined to be a suspicious circumstance.
In the interim between March 18, when Naiping Hou and his son, Wen Hou, had rented a boat at the San Pedro Pier to go fishing before the latter returned to his home in Las Vegas, and May 4, Hou’s wife and son had what was described as intermittent contact with him by text message exchanges on their cell phones. Mrs. Hou had departed for China in March to visit with her family.
In April, however, both Hou’s wife and Wen Hou noted there was something uncharacteristic about Hou’s text responses.
While she was yet in China, Mrs. Hou received a text from Hou’s phone, which in retrospect is now recognized as having not been sent by Naiping, telling her to cancel her flight home and that he would fly out to join her there.
In early May, Wen Hou grew concerned when, in anticipation of his father’s May 3 birthday, he suggested that Naiping come to Las Vegas to spend time with him and his grandchildren. When his father tersely declined the invitation, Wen Hou began to suspect that it was not his father who was texting him. He then overnighted his father a traditional Chinese gift of handmade noodles for his birthday. On May 3, called his father multiple times in an attempt to speak with him directly, but his father did not answer. To Wen’s text message that evening asking if he had gotten the gift, Naiping replied, without any elaboration and thanks, “Yes I receive it.”
On the morning of May 4, Wen Hou asked family friends to go to Rancho Cucamonga and look in on this father. The noodle package was sitting on the front porch. When those doing the welfare check did not get a response by knocking and ringing the doorbell, they let themselves inside. Virtually all of the furniture in the home had been removed and the interior of the home had been sloppily repainted. Both of Naiping’s cars were missing from the garage.
The sheriff’s department was summoned, whereupon it opened a missing person’s file on Naiping Hou.
It took investigators nearly two weeks to graduate from the initial assumption that Naiping Hou was absent from his Rancho Cucamonga home on his own volition or, as he had told his wife, in transit to, or already in, China. By early June, the case had gradually come into focus.
Naiping Hou was born in the Shaanxi province of China and immigrated to the United States, establishing a successful business in the San Gabriel Valley. He, prudently, indeed shrewdly, parlayed his profits into some lucrative investments and was able to retire comfortably more than a decade ago. His son, Wen, was pursuing a doctorate in electrical engineering at the University of California at Irvine when he recognized that the analytical expertise and simulation model techniques he had cultivated as an engineer would be directly and lucratively applied to commodity, securities and cryptocurrency trading, and he is now considered to be at the forefront of cryptocurrency negotiating as the chief investment officer for Coincident Capital.
It was recognized by investigators that Naiping Hou had access to several accounts with a substantial amount of money in them. Tracking of his account activity inexorably led to the conclusion that he was, for a time anyway, the captive of an individual or individuals who were forcing him, likely by means of torture or other duress, to transfer funds to which he had access to their use.
According to the sheriff’s department, there were “extensive fraudulent transactions” which occurred in late March and into April. At least $970,000 originating in Hou’s accounts was used to purchase large gold bars online and to trade in cryptocurrency.
In addition, both of Hou’s vehicles were sold, known items in the Hou home were found in the possession of others and someone posing as his home’s property owner attempted to rent it to prospective tenants.
While the sheriff’s detectives working the case have been tight-lipped regarding any progress they have made, it is known that suspicion fell on some private plumbing and home repair contractors who were in Hou’s home in February to redress extensive water damage that resulted from a leak that occurred in January. The immediate conversion of Hou’s available capital into bullion and cryptocurrency which can be easily traded internationally is an indication of [a] sophisticated operator[s] who may not be confined to the local area.
One theory is that through statements Hou may have made when the contractors or their employees were in his house, taken together with their learning that Mrs. Hou was to depart for China for an extended period in March, may have given rise to the attempt to move in on the 74-year-old while he was isolated.
Tracing cryptocurrency trades can be more challenging than following traditional financial transfers, Still, through the use of warrants, monetary exchanges using cryptocurrency transactions are traceable, as they are registered on a public, immutable blockchain. Law enforcement agencies can use blockchain analysis tools to investigate illegal activity, and recent legislation has intensified regulations subjecting monetary exchanges to multiple reporting requirements and the identification of both originators and receivers.
-Mark Gutglueck