Bad experience with lost or ****** card support center

Yesterday I responded to an incident where my father had just been ****** and the ******s had left with all of his debit and credit cards including his pin.

He had cards with 4 major banks in South Africa and I started phoning the relevant contacts for each bank to cancel the cards.

The first 2 banks I called were effortless, I provided them the details and they cancelled the cards.

The 3rd bank I phoned was Absa and I was given a blunt response that my father has no accounts with them, I tried to question this further because the information I was given was that he definetly has active accounts with Absa but the consultant didn't want to talk to me further and then put the phone down. I phoned back, ended up talking to a different consultant and shortly after they took down his ID details, the phone line dropped again.

I moved onto the next bank, again quick and effortless to cancel the cards. Then back to Absa, the only one with a problem....

Which ended up in a lot of confusion at the time because my dad was dealing with trauma and I you'd think Absa would handle this more professionally.

I tried calling Absa again, it wouldn't connect me to anyone in the lost and ****** card divisions this time, the system would divert to the division, ring and then redivert me to the normal support division which was probably not even active at that time. Finally on my 4th attempt, I got through to someone, they took down the details, acknowledged the 2 accounts and helped to stop them.

My best guess is that Absa do this purposely due to people *****ulently calling to cancel peoples cards but the way this was handled seems ridiculous and unprofessional, in this scenario ALL the other banks handled it well except for ABSA.