As if they don?t have enough to deal with, senior citizens have now been identified as being vulnerable to conmen and scam artists, who prey on the elderly by demanding money from them for work that never gets done.

On Tuesday, Dr. Melvin Dickinson told Hamilton Rotarians of cases where senior citizens were being charged thousands of dollars more than they should have been for repair work at their homes, including one case where a woman was charged $20,000 for a $4,000 job.

Recently, a heroin addict was jailed for two years for ripping off an elderly woman when he took money from her to repair her roof after Hurricane Fabian and was never seen again.

The reasons that seniors are vulnerable are many. In some cases, a surviving spouse may not have dealt with bills or repair work while their spouse was alive and may not be aware of how work needs to be done. In other cases, they may be so far removed from the working world that they have no idea of going rates for work. And sometimes, they may be lonely and desperate, and have no family members or friends to run to for advice.

All of these factors make seniors vulnerable to unscrupulous scam artists and criminals.

What is worse that many seniors simply do not have money to throw away. As has been reported in some detail over the last few years is that seniors face a daily juggling act, as Dr. Dickinson said, to meet bills for housing, food and medicine.

The Office for Seniors and other agencies are working hard to solve this problem.

But it is worrying that people who do rip off seniors do not always feel the full weight of the law. For want of a better term, they are non-violent muggers, preying on the elderly?s psyches rather than their physical weaknesses. Judges and magistrates should take note of the special circumstances of these cases and should come down hard at those who are convicted of these kinds of crimes.

Only when the criminals know that they are going to suffer for their actions ? and only when senior citizens know that they will be protected by the law ? will this community be able to say that it is caring for the people who built it.