What is going on at Absa

Problems at Absa 1: What is wrong at Absa? On Monday 16/11/2020 my wife paid with her Absa Visa card for a bed at a well known dealer in Pretoria to the amount of R13,500. She had a credit balance of over R14,000 on the card with available balance of over R30,000. A few minutes later a lady phoned telling she is from Absa and without further identification requested my wife's id number and address. Immediately my wife suspected that this is a **** and refused to give any information as Absa has told us on many occasions they won't request personal information over the phone. The lady said she is going to lock the card and my wife said if she do so she will move her accounts to another bank. On Tuesday 17/11 she went to Woolworths to buy stuff for R930 and her card did not work after trying it at 4 tills. She went to the Absa branch in Brooklyn Centre to find out that it was indeed locked. After it was unlocked she managed to pay at Woolworths and the transaction for the bed also went through. Had the lady identified herself properly and told my wife she was from Absa ***** she might have reacted differently saving my wife a lot of time wasted and embarrassment. My question is, what if we were at a lodge in the bushveld with no cellphone reception or in a neighboring country with no reception, how will you make a payment? 2: On Sunday 22/11 I had to make EFT payments on my Absa Online Banking from my pc to both my brother in law and sister in law of rather large amounts. None of them was defined as beneficiaries and after going through the whole story of adding them with 3 MMI's to be rep**** to for each on my cellphone and increasing my daily limit for payments I made the first payment which was rejected. Almost immediately a person phoned me, this time he properly introduced him as from Absa ***** and he want make sure I did the transaction and is the account holder. All went well and he told me to log off and log on again after which I re-did the transaction and both the first and second payment went through. I asked him what would have happened if I was at the above lodge and after my Credit Card payment failed I try to make a payment via EFT and he told me it also would not have worked if he could not get hold of me on the phone. 3: This morning I tried to buy LTE data with my credit card via the Telkom website and after filling in all my card information and proceed for payment I got the following message. acsabsa.bankserv.co.za took too long to respond I tried to find a contact number for Absa Credit Card problems on Google but to no avail.

Absa is really going over the board with ***** controlling making it impossible to do business with them. If you cannot trust you Credit Card to work if you have sufficient funds, how can you go to any place where there is no cellphone reception, that include many places in SA, and basically all other countries.