There are a few things this question can mean.
1) Concern about lost btc due to theft
If you don't have good computer security and backup, you can lose your bitcoins by someone copying your private keys and sending the bitcoins to another address. Also if your computer's data is lost and you don't have a backup, you'll never be able to get those private keys again and though you can still look at the bitcoins sitting on the blockchain, you'll never be able to move or spend them.
2) Concern about losing btc due to fees
Sometimes people have used rather high tech tools to make their own Bitcoin transactions. When using these tools (like brainwallet), if they don't understand how a transaction needs to be built not to lose money, they end up with big fees sent to the miners. The explanation on this is that each Bitcoin transaction takes a set of inputs and makes some number of outputs. The inputs are the money you have and the outputs are where the money is going. If the outputs don't add up to near the amount of the inputs, the rest goes to miners as transaction fees.
So typically when things went wrong, someone spent a 1 btc input and only made one 0.1 btc output for example. In this case, the other 0.9 btc have to be spent (since inputs must be spent completely) and they go to miners. In many of the higher profile cases, the mistake was remedied by contacting the pool that earned those fees but since miners may be anonymous, there is no guarantee that the coins will come back to you.