How does someone steal a debit card number and put it on another card?

So I apparently had my debit card number stolen. It was used in a completely different state at a JCPenney and Victoria Secret. This person bought 3 $200 gift cards at these places. JCPenney cameras show this guy buying them and handing the cashier a card and its swipped on the register. That was apparently tied to my debit card number. How does that happen???|||There are devices that mimic ATMs that people will sometimes be fooled by. When these fakes are in operation, many a soul will dutifully type in their numbers and swipe again and again and deposit without depositing and finding the machine is "out of money" when they try and take a dime. Then the poor dupes find that that machine simply stored the information on the magnetic strip so that it's vile creator could simply recreate it on a fake card.





But it gets worse.





Those victims from the above scenario eventually learn where the official working machines ARE.





Another scam includes more sophistication, but is utterly without "faker". Instead finely adjusted radars are used to scan the numbers off the card in ones wallet as one walks dawn the street, then the copy thieves simply wait for that person to go to the ATM and observe by camera or plain eyes and telescope directly the pins being put into any real ATM.





Yet another scam is for a crook to weasel into the good graces of a store, or credit card company (or worse, the government) and steal large numbers of account informations at the source as it were.





Yet another way crooks get account information is by criminal organizations such as dope dealers and prostitution rings. Persons who use such services and pay by credit card exist and oddly enough few of them get it that such people as ply these trades are possibly less than honest more of the time than the rest of us. AND are already on the other side of the law, and thus often less prosecutable.|||They have these machines that take the information off the strip off the card. Thats happened to my boss too.