Reports have it that bank frauds still continue to happen despite of strict security measures being taken by the banks. Just between January to July 2018, just timeshare fraud alone had 1.155 reported cases. It's when youre told you can go on a free holiday or get rich by joining an exclusive holiday club or timeshare programme, but youre eventually forced to pay for it through small print in the contact. That is not to mention other types of fraud like identity theft etc.
This gets me thinking, is it safer to just have bitcoins, or cryptocurrencies for that matter since it's not regulated by banks? What do you think?
I think that it's not necessarily safer in terms of the security of your funds per se.
You're probably able to claim compensation from hacks etc. if they do happen with a bank, which means that in most cases you're covered. However, I'd say that a perfectly secured bitcoin wallet is much safer than something like a bank which incur way higher rates of hacks, and fraud, including cheque fraud and credit card fraud.
Think of it this way - would you rather trust a central entity and a central database, or a decentralised system based on cryptography? Probably the latter.
Also this is not taking into account at all the reversibility of normal fiat banking payments, as well as the fact that bitcoin is a much better store of value than fiat. These all add up to give bitcoin the upper edge imho in terms of long term security.