Dad of crypto king mysteriously vanished in LA. Then ‘creepy texts' from him started to arrive in the family group chat
Naiping Hou, 74, of Rancho Cucamonga, California, was last seen on March 18. His family was alerted after the semi-retired grandpa began dodging phone calls and declining visits to see his grandchildren.
Hou is the father of Wen Hou, a hedge fund and cryptocurrency investor who serves as the chief investment officer at Coincident Capital.
The younger Hou told The Los Angeles Times that his father had become oddly detached on a family group chat since March, but that concerns over his father's wellbeing came to a head on his birthday on May 3. Naiping Hou had been invited to spend his birthday at his son's Las Vegas residence, but he declined. After his son sent him a birthday gift of handmade Chinese noodles, whoever was controlling the phone did not answer any calls.
Instead of thanks for the gift, as they expected, a text message was sent reading simply: 'Yes I receive it.'
Naiping Hou, a 74-year-old grandpa from southern California has been missing since May 4. His family was first alerted to his disappearance by strange text messages on the family group chat. (findnaipinghou.com)
The next morning, the family went to his home and found the noodle package still on the stoop. Inside, they said the furniture was missing and it appeared a new paint job had been done. The cars were missing from the garage, as well.
Naiping Hou was in China at the time. She also received a strange text message from her husband that told her to cancel her flight home and he would join her in Asia.
'We really are devastated, really sad, and we want him back if possible,' Wen Hou told The Times. 'We are pretty upset about how this was discovered so late and a bit upset about ourselves that we didn't find these clues earlier.'
San Bernardino County Sheriff's Office, which is now investigating the disappearance, confirmed they believed the elder Hou's phone was being 'used by an unknown individual(s) who impersonated him to communicate with family members.'
According to police, who investigated the home on May 4, evidence was found that 'indicated Naiping may have been kidnapped.'
Naiping Hou's son, crypto investor Wen Hou, has offered a reward of up to $250,000 for information leading to the safe return of his father, or the identification of those involved. A website – findnaipinghou.com – has also been launched (findnaipinghou.com)
'There has been unexplained and suspicious activity with Naiping's financial accounts and property; Draining of his accounts, unauthorized sales of his vehicles, gifting of items and the attempted renting of his home,' the sheriff's office said.
The office added that evidence also suggested that individuals connected to the crime may have ties to both the Los Angeles area and the Inland Empire.
'The suspects are believed to be using sophisticated and deceptive tactics and are considered highly dangerous.'
In addition, Wen Hou has offered a reward of up to $250,000 for information leading to the safe return of his father, or the identification of those involved. A website – findnaipinghou.com – has also been launched.
'We really are devastated, really sad, and we want him back if possible,' Wen Hou told The Times. 'We are pretty upset about how this was discovered so late and a bit upset about ourselves that we didn't find these clues earlier.'
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New York Post
an hour ago
- New York Post
Cambodia makes 1,000 arrests in latest cybercrime crackdown
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Cambodia on Wednesday said that an order by Prime Minister Hun Manet for government bodies to crackdown on criminal cybercrime operations being run in the country had resulted in the arrest of more than 1,000 suspects so far this week. Hun Manet issued the order authorising state action for 'maintaining and protecting security, public order, and social safety.' 'The government has observed that online scams are currently causing threats and insecurity in the world and the region. In Cambodia, foreign criminal groups have also infiltrated to engage in online scams,' Hun Manet's statement, dated Tuesday, said. Advertisement 6 Handcuffed suspects lying on the floor. POOL/AFP via Getty Images 6 Suspects with zip ties on their wrists sit on the floor during a raid on a scam center. POOL/AFP via Getty Images The United Nations and other agencies estimate that cyberscams, most of them originating from Southeast Asia, earn international criminal gangs billions of dollars annually. More than 1,000 suspects were arrested in raids in at least five provinces between Monday and Wednesday, according to statements from Information Minister Neth Pheaktra and police. Advertisement Those detained included more than 200 Vietnamese, 27 Chinese, and 75 suspects from Taiwan and 85 Cambodians in the capital Phnom Penh and the southern city of Sihanoukville. Police also seized equipment, including computers and hundreds of mobile phones. At least 270 Indonesians, including 45 women, were arrested Wednesday in Poipet, a town on the border with Thailand notorious for cyberscam and gambling operations, the minister said. Advertisement Elsewhere, police in the northeastern province of Kratie arrested 312 people, including nationals of Thailand, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Myanmar and Vietnam, while 27 people from Vietnam, China and Myanmar were arrested in the western province of Pursat. 6 The United Nations and other agencies estimate that cyberscams, most of them originating from Southeast Asia, earn international criminal gangs billions of dollars annually. AP 6 More than 1,000 suspects were arrested in raids in at least five provinces between Monday and Wednesday, according to statements from Information Minister Neth Pheaktra and police. POOL/AFP via Getty Images Amnesty International last month published the findings of an 18-month investigation into cybercrime in Cambodia, which the human rights group said 'point towards state complicity in abuses carried out by Chinese criminal gangs.' Advertisement 'The Cambodian government is deliberately ignoring a litany of human rights abuses including slavery, human trafficking, child labor and torture being carried out by criminal gangs on a vast scale in more than 50 scamming compounds located across the country,' it said. Human trafficking is closely associated with cyberscam operations, as workers are often recruited under false pretences and then held captive. 6 Amnesty International last month published the findings of an 18-month investigation into cybercrime in Cambodia. AP 'Deceived, trafficked and enslaved, the survivors of these scamming compounds describe being trapped in a living nightmare – enlisted in criminal enterprises that are operating with the apparent consent of the Cambodian government,' Amnesty International's Secretary General Agnes Callamard said. Cambodia's latest crackdown comes in the midst of a bitter feud with neighboring Thailand, which began with a brief armed skirmish in late May over border territory claimed by both nations and has now led to border closures and nearly daily exchanges of nationalistic insults. Friendly former leaders of both countries have become estranged and there have been hot debates over which nation's cultural heritage has influenced the other. 6 Arrested online scammers in a Cambodian cybercrime office. AP Measures initiated by the Thai side, including cutting off cross-border electricity supplies and closing crossing points, have particularly heightened tensions, with Cambodia claiming they were churlish actions of spite to retaliate for its intention to pursue its territorial claims. Thailand said its original intention was to combat long-existing cyberscam operations in Poipet.
Los Angeles Times
5 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
The forgotten godfather of Trump's scorched earth immigration campaign
He inveighs against illegal immigration in terms more appropriate for a vermin infestation. He wants all people without papers deported immediately, damn the cost. He thinks Los Angeles is a cesspool and that flying the Mexican flag in the United States is an act of insurrection. He uses the internet mostly to share crude videos and photos depicting Latinos as subhuman. Stephen Miller? Absolutely. But every time I hear the chief architect of Donald Trump's scorched earth immigration policies rail in uglier and uglier terms, I recall another xenophobe I hadn't thought of in awhile. For nearly 30 years, Glenn Spencer fought illegal immigration in Los Angeles and beyond with a singular obsession. The former Sherman Oaks resident kicked off his campaign, he told The Times in a 2001 profile, after seeing Latinos looting during the 1992 L.A. riots and thinking, 'Oh, my God, there are so many of them and they are so out of control.' Spencer was a key volunteer who pushed for the passage of Prop. 187, the 1994 California ballot initiative that sought to make life miserable for undocumented immigrants and was so punitive that a federal judge later ruled it unconstitutional. A multiplatform influencer before that became commonplace, Spencer hosted a local radio show, produced videos that he mailed to all members of Congress warning about an 'invasion' and turned his vitriolic newsletter into a website, American Patrol, that helped connect nativist groups across the country. American Patrol's home page was a collection of links to newspaper articles about suspected undocumented immigrants alleged to have committed crimes. While Spencer regularly trashed Muslims and other immigrants, he directed most of his bile at Mexicans. A 'Family Values' button on the website, in the colors of the Mexican flag, highlighted sex crimes allegedly committed by undocumented immigrants. Editorial cartoons featured a Mexican flag piercing a hole in California with the caption 'Sink-hole de Mayo.' Long before conservative activists recorded themselves infiltrating the conferences of political enemies, Spencer was doing it. He provoked physical fights at protests and published reams of digital nonsense against Latino politicians, once superimposing a giant sombrero on an image of Antonio Villaraigosa with the epithet, 'Viva Mexico!' On the morning Villaraigosa, the future L.A. mayor, was to be sworn in as speaker of the assembly in 1998, every seat in the legislative chamber was topped by a flier labeling him a communist and leader of the supposed Mexican takeover of California. 'I don't remember if his name was on it, but it was all his terminology,' said Villaraigosa, who recalled how Spencer helped make his college membership in the Chicano student group MEChA an issue in his 2001 mayoral loss to Jim Hahn. 'But he never had the balls to talk to me in person.' Spencer became the Johnny Appleseed of the modern-day Know Nothing movement, lecturing to groups of middle-aged gringos about his work — first across the San Fernando Valley, then in small towns where Latinos were migrating in large numbers for the first time. 'California [it] has often been said is America's future. Let me tell you about your future,' he told the Council of Conservative Citizens in Virginia in 1999. Spencer is the person most responsible for mainstreaming the lie of Reconquista, the wacko idea that Mexicans came to the U.S. not for economic reasons but because of a plot concocted by the Mexican government to take back the lands lost in the 1848 Mexican-American War. He wrote screeds like 'Is Jew-Controlled Hollywood Brainwashing Americans?' and threatened libel lawsuits against anyone — myself included — who dared point out that he was a racist. He was a favorite punching bag of the mainstream media, a slovenly suburban Ahab doomed to fail. The Times wrote in 2001 that Spencer 'foresaw millions of converts' to his anti-immigrant campaign, 'only to see his temple founder.' Moving to southern Arizona in 2002, the better to monitor the U.S.-Mexico border, Spencer spent the rest of his life trying to sell state and federal authorities on border-monitoring technology he developed that involved planes, drones and motion-detection sensors. His move inspired other conservatives to monitor the U.S.-Mexico border on their own. By the Obama era, he was isolated even from other anti-immigrant activists for extremist views like banning foreign-language media and insisting that every person who came to this country illegally was a drug smuggler. Even the rise of Trump didn't bring Spencer and his work back into the limelight. He was so forgotten that I didn't even realize he was dead until Googling his name recently, after enduring another Miller rant. Spencer's hometown Sierra Vista's Herald Review was the only publication I found that made any note of his death from cancer in 2022 at age 85, describing his life's work as bringing 'the crisis of illegal immigration to the forefront of the American public's consciousness.' That's a whitewash worthy of Tom Sawyer's picket fence. We live in Glenn Spencer's world, a place where the nastier the rhetoric against illegal immigration and the crueler the government's efforts against all migrants, the better. Every time a xenophobe makes Latinos out to be an invading force, every time someone posts a racist message on social media or Miller throws another tantrum on Fox News, Glenn Spencer gets his evil wings. Spencer 'stood out among a vile swamp of racists and crackpots like a tornado supercell on radar,' said Brian Levin, chair of the California Civil Rights Department's Commission on the State of Hate and founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino, who monitored American Patrol for years. 'What's frightening now is that hate like his used to be well-segregated from the mainstream. Now, the guardrails are off, and what Spencer advocated for is federal policy.' I first found out about Spencer in 1999 as a student activist at Chapman University. Spencer applauded the Anaheim Union High School District's decision to sue Mexico for the cost of educating undocumented immigrants' children, describing those of us who opposed it as communists — when he was being nice. His American Patrol described MEChA, which I, like Villaraigosa, belonged to, as a 'scourge' and a 'sickness.' His website was disgusting, but it became a must-read of mine. I knew even then that ignoring hate allows it to fester, and I wanted to figure out why people like Spencer despised people like me, my family and my friends. So I regularly covered him and his allies in my early years as a reporter with an obsession that was a reverse mirror of his. Colleagues and even activists said my work was a waste of time — that people like Spencer were wheezing artifacts who would eventually disappear as the U.S. embraced Latinos and immigrants. And here we are. Spencer usually sent me legal threats whenever I wrote about his ugly ways — threats that went nowhere. That's why I was surprised at how relatively polite he was the last time we communicated, in 2019. I reached out via email asking for an interview for a Times podcast I hosted about the 25th anniversary of Prop. 187. By then, Spencer was openly criticizing Trump's planned border wall, which he found a waste of money and not nearly as efficient as his own system. Spencer initially said he would consider my request, while sending me an article he wrote that blamed Prop. 187's demise on then-California Gov. Gray Davis and Mexico's president at the time, Ernesto Zedillo. When I followed up a few months later, Spencer bragged about the legacy of his website, which he hadn't regularly updated since 2013 due to declining health. The American Patrol archives 'would convince the casual observer that The Times did what it could do [to] defeat my efforts and advance the cause of illegal immigration,' Spencer wrote. 'Do I think The Times has changed its spots? No. Will I agree to an interview? No.' Levin hadn't heard about Spencer's death until we talked. 'I thought he went into irrelevance,' he admitted with a chuckle that he quickly cut off, realizing he had forgotten about Spencer's legacy in the era of Trump. 'We ignored that cough, that speck in the X-ray,' Levin concluded, now somber. 'And now, we have cancer.'
Epoch Times
12 hours ago
- Epoch Times
Candles and Courage: Stories of Faith During 26 Years of Persecution
SAN DIEGO—Falun Gong practitioners in San Diego held a commemorative event at Ruocco Park on July 11, marking 26 years since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched its nationwide persecution against the peaceful spiritual practice. The event featured an art exhibition and candlelight vigil to honor victims of the ongoing Most of the paintings are based on true stories, according to the organizers. Among them, one titled 'Come Back Daddy' depicted the true story of a family in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province. In the painting, a young girl clutches a commemorative photo of her father, Chen Chengyong, while standing beside her grieving mother. For Wang Hongfa and Deng Yi, now residents of San Diego, the artwork holds deep, personal meaning. 'We were close friends with that little girl's parents,' Wang said. Before the persecution began, the two couples often practiced Falun Gong together in local parks. Before 1999, Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, had spread rapidly throughout China, attracting tens of millions with its meditative practices and values of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance—until it was suddenly banned by the regime on July 20, 1999. Related Stories The girl was born a year into the CCP's persecution campaign. Her father was killed for his beliefs before she turned 1 year old. Painting titled "Come Back Daddy." Courtesy of San Diego Falun Dafa Association Survivors Speak Out Wang and Deng were both survivors of severe and repeated torture in Chinese labor camps. They shared their stories during the event, urging Americans to understand the gravity of the CCP's human rights abuses and to resist its global influence. Wang, formerly an engineer in China, was dismissed from his job after refusing to renounce his belief in Falun Gong. In 2003, he was abducted and sent to a forced labor camp, where he endured a form of torture that tightly bound his body into a ball shape, with his head buried in between his legs, using cloth strips. The bindings were repeatedly tightened and loosened to intensify the pain, and he was eventually suspended from the ceiling while tied in that position. Human rights groups have 'My arms were deeply cut and scarred, and for weeks I couldn't move my fingers or take care of myself,' Wang said. 'I feared healing because it only meant more torture was coming.' Falun Gong practitioners light candles in memory of lives lost during 26 years of persecution. Courtesy of San Diego Falun Dafa Association After fleeing to Thailand in 2011, Wang and his wife resettled in San Diego in 2013 through the United Nations refugee program. Deng, his wife, recounted her own experience of torture through force-feeding. After she began a hunger strike to protest her detention, a labor camp doctor inserted a thick tube through her nose and into her stomach—a painful procedure that left the tube in place for hours each day while she was tied to a bed. Weeks later, she was subjected to another method of oral force-feeding. Bound to a custom-made 'force-feeding chair,' Deng was immobilized while seven or eight guards pried open her mouth, inserted a metal spoon down her throat, and poured bowls of porridge directly into her mouth. 'The porridge came too fast to swallow,' she recalled. 'It stayed in my mouth, unable to go down or be spit out. It felt like I was going to choke to death at any moment.' During those days, she endured this method of torture three times a day. UCSD Student, an Orphan, Recalls Childhood Philip Zhu, a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego, also spoke about his childhood under the shadow of the CCP's persecution. Zhu's mother was persecuted to death for practicing Falun Gong when he was just 6 years old. His father, who spent years moving from city to city to avoid harassment and arrest, also died alone. A relative stepped in to raise him. 'I never dared to ask my relatives when exactly my mother died,' Zhu said. 'People were too afraid to talk about Falun Gong, and that made me feel very lonely.' (L–R) Deng Yi, Philip Zhu, Wang Hongfa, and Nathaniel Harris, a community representative from Supervisor Joel Anderson's office. Courtesy of San Diego Falun Dafa Association Zhu now shares Falun Gong's principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance on campus. But even in the United States, he has encountered pro-CCP Chinese students who have tried to intimidate him. 'I'm grateful for the freedom of belief in America,' Zhu said. 'But I also know how fragile it can be if we don't speak out.' Local Officials Offer Support The event drew the support of local leaders and elected officials, several of whom spent time at the park listening to survivors' testimonies and viewing the artwork. Michelle Metschel, a council member from El Cajon, was visibly moved by what she heard. 'I want to share your story ... and show the American people what Falun Gong is doing and how you are promoting peace, and love, and compassion, and truthfulness. I am touched and saddened by the stories I've heard today,' she said. San Diego County Supervisor Joel Anderson issued a proclamation recognizing Falun Gong for its 'unwavering dedication to public education, artistic expression, and the preservation of spiritual freedom.' 'Falun gong is a peaceful spiritual practice root in the core principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance, offering individuals across the globe a path to inner peace, moral clarity and physical well-being,' Anderson wrote. The event 'serves as a powerful testament to those who uphold their beliefs in the face of adversity, while fostering compassion, awareness, and dialogue within our own communities.' Nathaniel Harris, a community representative from Anderson's office, attended the event in person and stayed through the candlelight vigil. 'This event was powerful and moving,' he said. Supervisor Jim Desmond also issued a commendation, stating: 'I offer my heartfelt commendation for your steadfast dedication to truth, compassion, and tolerance in the face of adversity. Your peaceful efforts inspire courage, hope, and resilience. Through your advocacy, you not only raise awareness of transnational repression, but also help protect the fundamental freedoms that unite us all.' Jenny Maeda, a Poway city council member, attended the exhibit with her family and expressed her strong support for the practitioners' courage and message. Max Ellorin, community director for Supervisor Monica Montgomery Steppe, also visited the art exhibit and spoke with practitioners to learn more about the persecution and their continued faith in the face of it.
