A Newport Beach man was sentenced to more than five years in prison after federal prosecutors said he laundered at least $3.5 million as part of a multi-state criminal enterprise.

Evan Tangeman, 22, was sentenced in Washington, D.C., Friday, April 24, to five years and 10 months in prison after he pleaded guilty in December to taking part in a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) conspiracy in which participants stole more than $263 million in cryptocurrency and used the money to live lavish lifestyles, according to a U.S. Department of Justice statement.

Tangeman was the ninth person to plead guilty in connection with the scheme, which prosecutors said began around October 2023 and lasted through at least May 2025. The enterprise, prosecutors said, grew from friendships created through online gaming platforms and included co-conspirators from California, New York, Florida, Connecticut and abroad.

Members of the group included database hackers, organizers, target identifiers, callers and residential burglars who targeted hardware virtual currency wallets, which store cryptocurrency, prosecutors said.

Tangeman, who also went by “Tate,” “E,” and “Evan|Exchanger,” money laundered for the group, helped his co-conspirators take millions from victims and also received money and luxury items like exotic cars for his work, according to the DOJ.

When the first members of the criminal enterprise were arrested, Malone Lam of Los Angeles and Miami and Jeandiel Serrano of Los Angeles, Tangeman told his co-defendant Tucker Desmond of Huntington Beach to destroy digital devices that belonged to enterprise members, prosecutors said.

Using stolen virtual currency, members of the enterprise bought nightclub services sometimes totaling up to $500,000 a night, luxury handbags worth thousands of dollars that were given away at parties and luxury watches worth between $100,000 and $500,000. They also used the stolen money to purchase luxury clothing; rental homes in Los Angeles, the Hamptons and Miami; private jet rentals; private security guards and various exotic cars valued between $100,000 to $3.8 million, according to the DOJ.

Tangeman also converted the cryptocurrency to fiat cash, or money not tied to gold or other assets, with the help of real estate agents in Los Angeles, bought mansions for members of the scheme that were valued between $4 million and $9 million, prosecutors said.

He also arranged homes in Miami when the group of conspirators, who were unemployed men mostly under 20 years old, moved there in September 2024. The men bought the homes because they worried they would draw law enforcement’s attention if they rented large homes for tens of thousands of dollars each month when they had no income, according to the DOJ.

One of Tangeman’s co-conspirators arranged the purchase of a widebody Lamborghini Urus for Tangeman, and when law enforcement executed a search warrant at his home, they found and seized other luxury vehicles, including a 2022 Rolls Royce Ghost valued at more than $300,000 and a Porsche GT3 RS.

Key Takeaways:

• Bitcoin mining stocks have dramatically outperformed BTC itself in 2026, with most of the top ten publicly listed mining organizations posting year-to-date (YTD) gains of 25–73% while bitcoin sits roughly 12% in the red since January 1.
• The outperformance is not a mining story; it’s an artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure story. The leaders have collectively locked in tens of billions in contracted HPC revenue through long-term hyperscaler deals, effectively revaluing themselves as data center operators.
• Terawulf (WULF) leads the top ten public miners with a 73.58% YTD gain after securing over $12.8 billion in contracted HPC revenue, with deals anchored by Google-backed Fluidstack and Core42 across sites totaling over 1 GW of available power.

Anthropic and Google Are Signing Billion-Dollar Leases With Bitcoin Miners

Most of the ten largest publicly traded miners have outpaced the underlying asset by a wide margin. Terawulf (Nasdaq: WULF) leads the group with a 73.58% gain YTD. Hut 8 Corp. (Nasdaq: HUT) follows at 67.75%, trading at $77.06, the highest share price among the top ten listed miners by market valuation.

Riot Platforms (Nasdaq: RIOT) is up 47.04%, and both Applied Digital (Nasdaq: APLD) and Core Scientific (Nasdaq: CORZ) are sitting on gains above 40%. These aren’t modest beats. These are companies posting equity gains four to six times larger than bitcoin’s move, in the opposite direction. The reason is AI.

The sector has undergone a fundamental repositioning in early 2026. Miners carry assets that hyperscalers urgently want: access to low-cost power, industrial-scale sites, and grid expertise. Companies that have moved quickly to convert that infrastructure into AI and high-performance computing (HPC) data centers have been rewarded. Those that haven’t are being left behind.

Miners already had the hardest parts figured out when they started mining bitcoin. They’ve spent years solving problems that would take a traditional real estate developer or tech company years to replicate: permitting large power loads, negotiating with utilities, building out substations, managing heat dissipation at scale, and running 24/7 operations with high uptime requirements. Those aren’t small things. Power procurement alone can take years and can halt most data center projects before they start.

Terawulf is the clearest example of the trade working. The company has locked in over $12.8 billion in contracted HPC revenue through long-term leases with Google-backed Fluidstack and Core42, with sites in Hawesville, Kentucky, and Morgantown, Maryland, scaling toward 1 GW of available power. HPC now drives over half of annual revenues. The stock reflects it.

Hut 8 has taken a similar path, anchoring a $7 billion, 15-year lease at its River Bend campus with Anthropic and Fluidstack as counterparties, while building an 8.5 GW development pipeline across due diligence, exclusivity, and active construction stages.

Core Scientific has also seen similar execution. The company has secured roughly $10–12 billion in contracted revenue through Coreweave partnerships spanning 590 MW of critical IT load across six sites, including a $1.2 billion expansion in Denton, Texas. Analysts forecast HPC driving approximately 70% of 2026 revenue.

Applied Digital has signed multiple 15-year leases with Coreweave for 400 MW of critical IT load at its North Dakota campus, generating roughly $11 billion in contracted revenue and running HPC hosting margins above 25%. IREN Limited (IREN), sitting atop the top ten list by market cap at $16.71 billion, has a Microsoft AI cloud partnership valued in the billions and a 4.5 GW power pipeline, with HPC revenue projected to reach 71% of total by year-end.

Cipher Digital (Nasdaq: CIFR), now fully rebranded from Cipher Mining, has exited most of its bitcoin operations entirely, replacing them with a $9.3 billion contracted HPC backlog anchored by a 300 MW AWS deal and a Google-backstopped Fluidstack agreement.

Not every name is at the same stage, and that’s not necessarily a problem. MARA Holdings (MARA) and Riot Platforms (RIOT) are posting YTD returns of 29.56% and 47.04%, respectively. Solid numbers by any standard, even if they sit below the group leaders. Both companies are moving, just on a slightly different timeline.

Riot holds 1.7 GW of power capacity across its Texas sites, including Corsicana and Rockdale, and has begun construction of 112 MW of AI-ready core-and-shell capacity at Corsicana as part of a planned 600 MW buildout. MARA is taking a different approach, building international exposure through its majority stake in Exaion, an EDF subsidiary that brings European AI and HPC cloud expertise into the fold.

Bitdeer (Nasdaq: BTDR) sits at the bottom of the year-to-date table at just 7.62%, still down 6.40% over the past five trading days. The company is building what it describes as Norway’s largest AI data center. A 180 MW facility in Tydal targeting Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs, and is converting sites in Ohio and Washington State, but the pipeline hasn’t translated into contracted revenue at the scale investors are rewarding elsewhere.

Cleanspark (Nasdaq: CLSK), up 25.88% YTD, is further along than Bitdeer with over 1.8 GW of power under contract and advanced discussions with hyperscale tenants, but initial AI deployments aren’t targeted until 2026–2027.

The takeaway from January through April is straightforward. The miners winning in 2026 are the ones that closed hyperscaler deals first. Power capacity alone isn’t enough — the market is pricing contracted backlog, delivery timelines, and the quality of counterparties. Terawulf, Hut 8, Core Scientific, Applied Digital, IREN, and Cipher Digital have all demonstrated some version of that. Others are working to catch up. Bitcoin‘s price direction from here will matter, but for the leading names in this group, it’s becoming a secondary consideration.

The FBI has joined an investigation into the suspicious disappearance of a Southern California grandfather, which his family believes could be tied to their success in the cryptocurrency business.

Federal authorities recently became involved in the probe for missing Rancho Cucamonga resident Naiping Hou, 74, who is the father of noted hedge fund and cryptocurrency investor Wen Hou. The son serves as the chief investment officer at Coincident Capital. In 2022, Wen Hou and his wife, who live in Las Vegas, contributed $1.1 million in cryptocurrency to the USC Keck School of Medicine to help fund research on heart disease.

Naiping Hou was last seen in his hometown on March 18, 2025. He was officially reported missing on May 4, 2025, after which detectives determined someone impersonated him using his cellphone for over a month.

“Possible foul play is suspected, as his bank accounts were depleted prior to law enforcement being notified about his disappearance,” the FBI officials said in a news release.

His loved ones previously told KABC that the kidnapping could be tied to the family’s success in crypto.

“I miss him a lot,” Wen Hou said about his father in July 2025. “He’s sort of a guide to my life.”

In a previous LA Times interview, Wen Hou said he became concerned about his father in April 2025 when his text messages in the family group chat began to feel robotic. Naiping Hou became increasingly withdrawn through the messages, less communicative and refused to visit his grandchildren, he claimed.

Wen Hou’s concerns escalated around his father’s May 3 birthday when he began to suspect that someone else may have been controlling his phone. He said his father declined to travel to Las Vegas to see family and did not respond to calls. Instead of reacting warmly to a gift of handmade Chinese noodles sent to his Rancho Cucamonga home, a text from Naiping Hou’s phone simply read, “Yes I received it.”

The out-of-state son asked family friends to check on his father the following day. Upon arrival, they reportedly found the unopened noodle package left on the doorstep. Inside the home, they discovered that the residence appeared to have been largely cleared out, with all furniture removed and a poorly done interior paint job.

Investigators determined that someone had been using Naiping Hou’s phone to impersonate him and carry out extensive fraudulent bank transactions, including purchasing gold bars online. Wen Hou said that was unusual since his father was not tech-savvy and had never bought gold before.

A tip website Wen Hou created to find his missing father remains active, offering a $250,000 reward.

Anyone with information on Naiping Hou’s case is asked to contact their local FBI office or the nearest American Embassy or Consulate.