She thought she was helping her ‘best friend.’ After forking over $600K, she never heard from him again — and owed $225K to the IRS

Flowers was the victim of a “pig-butchering scam,” where a bad actor gains the trust of someone in order to get them to give up money toward fraudulent investments.

By the end of it all, she had removed $400,000 from her retirement fund and taken out $200,000 in personal loans to help someone she thought was her friend. Now, she’s out that money and facing a $225,000 tax bill to boot.

Here’s how she ended up in that situation — and what you can do to avoid being put in the same place.

Now without a retirement plan or the ability to build it back

In 2022, Flowers was approached online by a man who said he was from Brussels. He reached out to her on LinkedIn, saying he was planning to move to her area soon. The two talked over email and on the phone, but never in person.

“I thought we were really getting to know each other,” Flowers told USA Today. “What I think I know now is, he was using AI.”

She got to know him over the course of four months — which is when he asked her to bail him out by investing in his business.

“It was as if my best friend had asked me,” Flowers told USA Today.

Roughly $600,000 of stolen money later, she realized it was a scam. That’s when the IRS sent her a $225,000 bill: It had counted the missing money from her retirement account as taxable income, plus penalties for withdrawing money before she was of retirement age.

Flowers ended up having to declare Chapter 13 bankruptcy. She’s currently making $5,600 per month payments on her debt, most of which goes to the IRS; she expects to continue making these payments for the next few years.

“Because I’m having to pay back the taxes on this, I can’t even rebuild the nest egg that was stolen,” Flowers told Bloomberg. “Because when they calculate that bankruptcy payment, it’s all your discretionary dollars. There’s nothing left.”