Even the smart people can be duped. Take Francis Sharples who is a science advisor to the White House. Still, she went to her credit union, following the instructions of the person still listening on the phone, and withdrew $600,000 -- her retirement fund. She provided the routing money where the money was to be sent.

Sad story, but, according to the Washington Post, it gets worse.

The Internal Revenue Service told Sharples, 73, she had to pay hefty taxes on the stolen money, which the federal government considers income because it was in a tax-deferred account. Tax specialists told the newspaper that someone in Sharples’s position could face a six-figure bill.

“It goes against a person’s conscience,” Ismael Guerra, a retired IRS criminal investigator and revenue agent who independently examined Sharples’s case told the Post. “The scammers get away, the government gets its piece, and she gets nothing.”

Before 2018, Sharples would have found a long-established deduction for individual theft victims. But congressional Republicans changed the provision in 2017 as part of the biggest overhaul of the tax code in decades. To offset some of the cuts, its drafters suspended the provision through 2025. This year, more than 100 House Republicans co-sponsored legislation that would make the change permanent.

The House’s tax-writing committee said in 2017 the repeal of a deduction that helped theft victims was part of an effort to make the tax system “simpler and fairer for all families and individuals.”

Told of the potential consequences of the law change for Sharples and others, an aide to a senior GOP member of the Ways and Means Committee — who agreed to describe the committee’s reasoning on the condition of anonymity — said “tax provisions like this were removed to offset the cost of lowering tax rates for everyone.”

The Biden administration has defended the Trump-era tax law in court, arguing Congress acted deliberately when it suspended tax relief for individual theft victims. The Treasury Department would not comment on Sharples’s case or, more generally, on victims in similar circumstances identified through interviews and court records. A Treasury spokesperson declined to say whether the administration wants the law changed.

As the woman told the Post, “I have a f---ing PhD. I’m not a stupid person,” she said, crying, her dog at her side. “I should have known better.”