LOS ANGELES — The FBI has joined the investigation into the suspicious disappearance of 74-year-old Naiping Hou, a resident of Rancho Cucamonga and father of noted cryptocurrency investor Wen Hou.

FBI officials said the agency was joining the investigation begun last year by the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department. They said the joint investigation was launched about a month ago.

Wen Hou could not immediately be reached for comment

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times last year, he said he began to suspect something was wrong when he started to receive weird text messages from his father in April.

He said his father gave robotic responses in a family group chat and became more silent and refused to visit his grandchildren.

It was on Naiping Hou’s May 3 birthday that his son began to suspect someone else was controlling his father’s phone.

He said his father refused to visit him and his grandchildren at their Las Vegas home. Wen Hou said whoever was controlling his phone refused to answer any calls on the birthday and, instead of thanking Wen Hou for the handmade Chinese noodles he sent as a gift to his father’s Rancho Cucamonga home, he simply texted: “Yes I received it.”

Wen Hou said he asked family friends to go check in on his father the following day. Hou said they found the noodle package sitting on the stoop. Inside the home, he said they found that it had been stripped of all its furniture and had a shoddy new paint job on the interior walls

His father’s cars were also missing from the garage. Naiping Hou was nowhere to be found.

The elder Hou was reported missing on May 4 of last year, according to the Sheriff’s Department.

Detectives believe someone used the elder Hou’s cellphone to impersonate him for more than a month. Extensive fraudulent transactions were also made using his bank account around the time of his disappearance, the department said in a written statement.

The elder Hou’s wife was visiting family in China around the time he is believed to have gone missing, according to his family. While abroad she received a text from Hou’s phone telling her to cancel her flight home, saying that he would join her in Asia.

Although Wen Hou doesn’t know who is behind the possible crimes against his father, he fears that contractors who performed work on Naiping Hou’s home at the beginning of the year may have preyed on his father or even kidnapped him.

Wen Hou, a well-known hedge fund and cryptocurrency investor, serves as the chief investment officer at Coincident Capital.

In 2022, he and his wife gifted $1.1 million in cryptocurrency to the USC Keck School of Medicine to support research on heart disease.

Wen Hou said his parents have been living at the Rancho Cucamonga home for about 20 years.

He said his father, who is from China, spends his time woodworking and playing ping-pong at a local recreation center.

Wen Hou said he last saw his father in March 2025. That month they had rented a boat at the San Pedro Pier and went on a family fishing trip.

Since his father’s disappearance, Wen Hou has created a website to bring awareness to his father’s case. In it are photos of his father and a poster offering a $250,000 reward for information leading to his father’s recovery. There is also a video in which he makes a plea to the public for their help.

Among the photos in the website is one of his father holding a fishing rod after catching a fish.

“The family is heartbroken,” Wen Hou said in the video. “We just want him back.”

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