Asmat Khan and his accomplice either switched off the ATM or forced it to malfunction. The Nagpada police caught them after a tip-off

52 debit cards recovered from them.Two youths have been arrested by the Nagpada police for allegedly cheating several banks of Rs 1 crore with fake claims of ATM withdrawal failures.The police said they have recovered around 52 debit cards from the youths, Asif Khan, 19, a resident of Rajasthan, and Asmat Khan, 21, from Haryana, who met each other on social media.The police said they used to withdraw as much as Rs 30,000-35,000 from bank ATMs, hold on to the cash tray just as the money was dispensed, which prompted the machine to malfunction, or switch off the machine themselves, and then call the customer centre of the bank, claiming that their transaction had failed.“Once the machine used to get switched off, they used to take the money and then flee and later call the customer care of the bank and then tell them that they had withdrawn money from the ATM but the machine had switched off and that they did not get the money,” said Sandesh Manjarekar, assistant inspector from Nagpada police station.The banks failed to check the CCTV camera footage of the ATM kiosks “This way we have found lot of reversal entries in their passbook. They have cheated to the tune of Rs 1crore. They have been booked for cheating, common intention and under Information Technology Act ,” said Manjarekar.“We had a tip-off that some people were going to carry out a robbery in an ATM centre. We detained them following which we learnt that they had cheated several banks,” said Santosh Bagwe, senior inspector of Nagpada police station.With the recovery of 52 debit cards, the police realised that they have around accounts in IDBI Bank Axis Bank , SVC Co-Operative Bank Ltd, Oriental Bank of Commerce, Payment Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Federal bank, IDFC, SBI, ICICI Bank, Yes Bank, PTM, Punjab National Bank, DG Bank, Central Bank of India and Union Bank.