An elderly man has been cruelly taken advantage of after his trusted aged carer stole a hefty sum of money from his account. But Andrew John Ryan won’t spend any of his two-year suspended jail term, handed down in the Cairns District Court, behind bars. Yesterday the 58-year-old pleaded guilty to fraud for taking $24,000 from his 82-year-old victim via the man’s bank card. “It seems to me it was really quite predatory behaviour,” Judge Terry Martin SC said. Ryan was a Cairns-based senior social worker with the Cairns and Hinterland Hospital Health Service based and had been a carer for Carl Haire since 2014. Mr Haire’s twin sister Caroline Van Der Schans, who was in court for the sentence, said that she and her brother had been shocked by what they found.
