2 Held in Scam That Netted $100,000 From Fake ATM : Counterfeiting: Thieves used phony machine to obtain customers’ confidential codes, then made bogus cards to obtain cash.

Federal agents arrested two men suspected of being high-tech scam artists who used a phony automated teller machine to steal nearly $100,000 from bank card users, the Secret Service said Tuesday.

In a twist of irony, automatic teller machines played a role in the pair’s arrest, according to authorities. The two were hunted with photo information supplied by functioning ATM machines.

The real ATM machines were used by thieves to siphon off money with counterfeit bank cards imprinted with numbers picked up by their dummy ATM creation.

The Secret Service made their first arrest Friday and followed it with a second on Tuesday.

The suspects were identified as Alan Scott Pace, 30, of New York City, described as an ex-convict with a history of fraud arrests, and Gerald Harvey Greenfield of Tucson, Ariz.

They were charged with wire fraud, counterfeiting of access devices, bank fraud and several other offenses, said Dan Marchitello, the agent in charge of the investigation for the Secret Service.

Pace was arrested Friday in New York City and arraigned in Connecticut, where he was held in custody over the weekend at an undisclosed location.

Greenfield was arrested Tuesday and was to be arraigned in U.S. District Court in New Haven.

Pace, according to the Secret Service, had previous convictions for wire fraud and served 22 months in a federal prison in San Diego.

The FBI had outstanding warrants for Pace in Salt Lake City; he was wanted by the U.S. Marshals Service for parole violation, and there were outstanding warrants against him for failing to appear for fraud charges in Dover, N.H., and Tucson.

Authorities said three men posing as representatives of a New Jersey financial services company coaxed managers of the Buckland Hills Mall in Manchester, Conn., into letting them install an ATM machine near the entrance to a department store in the mall.

The men wheeled the machine into place April 24. For 16 days, the culprits used the phony machine to record confidential account information from customers, including their secret pass codes for retrieving cash from accounts.

To win the users’ confidence, authorities said, the thieves planted seed money so that people would think the ATM machine was legitimate.

Customers who used the machine later received slips saying their transaction could not be processed after they had entered their confidential account information.

Then, authorities said, the scam architects used the codes and numbers to make counterfeit bank cards. The counterfeits were used in making almost $100,000 in cash withdrawals from ATMs in several states on the East Coast.