Your Sister’s Expired ATM Card . . . I Think We Get It

ATMs, like those new-fangled parking meters, are just so darn smart nowadays:

You walk up to the ATM. Feed your card into the slot, and it disappears. Maybe you get an error message.

What do you do? Contact the bank manager? Push the button and ask for customer assistance? Fiddle with the ATM numbers?

Lawrence Grey went a different route, cops say — he got a tire iron and sought vengeance on the machine.

Now he faces a felony charge.

Early on Thursday, at about 2:20 a.m., the 44-year-old Brooklyn construction worker slipped his sister’s expired ATM card into the machine at the SI Bank & Trust at 6975 Amboy Road in Tottenville, according to court papers.

When the machine wouldn’t give the card back, he tried to pry the front plate off with a tool he had on him, likely a screwdriver, then left, according to a source close to the investigation.

A few minutes later, “he came back with a tire iron, and started whaling on the machine,” the source said.

The attack cracked the face plate and damaged the wiring underneath, according to court papers.

One source estimated the damage at more than $5,000.

Bank security notified the police, but Grey was gone before they arrived, authorities said.

But a security camera caught him in the act, and a detective from the NYPD and FBI’s Joint Bank Robbery Task Force used his sister’s card to track him down, according to a law enforcement source.

He ultimately admitted to cops that he realized “what I did was stupid,” but was worried about losing his sister’s card, the source said.