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The most common ways this happens (I used to work in Fraud Prevention):

- You were swiped.
This can happen anywhere. At restaurants, gas stations, even at your ATM if it's been tampered with. Someone explained it already but basically someone swipes your credit/debit card not to charge you for what you're buying but to steal the cc number. They can also do the 'writing it down thing' but this is less common.

- You bought from an untrusted source online.
There are plenty of online shops that don't have the right security parameters to be handling credit card transactions. Always buy from reputable places or us payment systems that are reputable (PayPal, etc) and make sure the payments pages are using https.

- Your details were compromised a long time ago and just now were tested.
If you keep up with the news, there have been several times when large merchants (TJ Maxx, as an example) were compromised and had huge swaths of thousands of cc numbers stolen from their database. It happens and your cc details (if your debit card has a Visa/Mastercard logo it's the same as a credit card so same rules apply) are floating around for any fraudster to check out either now or months later.

- You have malware on your computer.
If you've clicked on shady links, opened weird emails, your computer is running slower than normal, etc you could have malware. Viruses and malware could be tracking what you're typing on your computer and/or intercepting the information as you purchase. When my card got compromised I cleaned my computer with McAfee right away.

Otherwise, this happens pretty frequently. Getting your cc stolen is annoying and scary but not as terrible as getting your SSN stolen. That is a huge, huge mess.

Even if you swipe your card, they could easily have attached a device to it that takes your credit card number. If you're not familiar with what that console is supposed to look like at that store/restaurant/gas station you won't know they've attached something to it.

The best defense against this is to check your statements regularly and pick a bank with a good fraud protection program.