Update: The name of the road the Marathon station is located on has been corrected.

A growing new trend of covertly stealing credit card information from customers fueling up at the gas pumps has finally arrived in Michigan — and Dowagiac appears to be ground zero for the invasion.

Last Monday, an inspection officer with the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development Weights and Measures Division uncovered three illegal devices, designed to capture and transmit numbers and other information from credit and debit cards, which were hidden inside gas pumps at the Marathon station located on CR 690 in Sister Lakes.

Of the three devices collected, one appeared to be completely installed and functional inside the pump’s built-in credit card reader, said MDARD official Craig VanBuren.

“It was installed within the card reader, so no customer could see it,” VanBuren said.

The card “skimmers” were discovered during an otherwise routine inspection of the Marathon’s gas pumps, VanBuren said. The 15 inspectors with the state office, who are responsible for checking pumps located at the nearly 4,700 gas stations located across Michigan, have been on the lookout for these devices since the beginning of the year, VanBuren said.

“While we’ve heard there is a problem with these devices in states like Florida, this is the first we’ve come across them in Michigan,” VanBuren said

Based on the lack of mass storage installed on the devices, MDARD officials believe that the skimmers remotely transmit information from cards inserted into the reader to a device located nearby the station, VanBuren said. Since many pumps share a standard locking mechanism, whoever was responsible for placing the devices inside the machines likely used a universal key to gain access to the pump itself, VanBuren said.

While not an area with heavy traffic, the large amount of visitors to the Sister Lakes area may have made the Marathon station attractive for the party responsible for installing the card skimmer, VanBuren said.

“A lot of cars that stop at that station are from out-of-state,” he said. “There is a greater chance they would steal information from someone who lives outside the area versus someone who visits the station all the time.”

Since obtaining the skimmers, MDARD has turned over the investigation to the U.S. Secret Service, which is responsible for looking into credit card fraud related crimes.

Since skimmers like these are nearly impossible to detect, people who frequently pay at the pump are urged to closely monitor credit card or bank statements for fraudulent charges, VanBuren said. Citizens who suspect a pump has been illegally tampered with can report it to MDARD via their phone number 1-800-632-3835.