I have an acquaintance in Cape Town who runs a business. The other day, at a meeting, he said something particularly rude and, noticing the silence around him, said: “I am in business to make money, not friends.”

Very often, we are told by way of advertising that certain organisations want to help you. These organisations are generally investment trusts, banks, mutual societies, telecommunications organisations, and so on. The adverts show us a man moving swiftly through life from a young boy to a successful senior manager, all the time being assisted by one organisation or another.

None of what we see in the adverts is true. I am going to talk about this fraudulent dishonesty, which pervades our society and has only arisen as a result of the computer age.

I will begin with me. I inherited some money – not a huge amount, but a significant sum. It was paid into my bank and, since I want to invest in other places than my own bank, I went to another bank and asked them what the best investment I could do was. Oh, they gushed: “What you do is you put it on fixed deposit for a year. Then we will pay the interest on the money into a savings account every month. And then we will give you an interest rate of 7%.”

This sounded good. But it is rubbish. I worked out that, if I just stuck it in a savings account where I could withdraw it at two days’ notice, I would have earned a compound interest more than the idea proposed. But the bank did not tell me that. They did not tell me that this whole idea was a scheme dreamed up by some twisted accountant to squeeze more than the usual sums out of their clients. They also made me sign about 20 forms, one of which was a life assurance policy, which I did not need. When I asked why they had not told me that I was signing a life assurance application, they just said: “Oh, it’s part of the package”.

Before the computer age, the paperwork required to rip me off would have made it an unfeasible proposition. But now it is.

Here is another one: if I phone my bank with a query, I get the recording (which we all know very well) about the call being important to them and asking me to please stay on the line (gosh) – the call will be answered shortly and thank you for your patience and please stay on the line as all our operators are currently busy. And you know that the bank could not care one jot about how long you wait and how much time the bank people waste. All the bank wants is to save the pitiful salaries of two or three call centre staff in exchange for the terrible service they give.

This is just a repetition of my 55-year history of standing in queues in banks because the banks are too mean to provide enough tellers. Because of computers, they can work out to a cent whatever profit they make out of wasting your time.

Then, of course, there are the cellphone companies. If you phone directory enquires, they say: “Thank you for calling directory enquiries (pause) . . . All calls may be recorded for quality and reference purposes (pause) . . . All calls are charged at the general service rate applicable to your tariff (pause for 30 seconds).”

So, what is happening here? Simply, for one minute of your call, you are paying to listen to stuff you do not need to listen to. But the computer technology allows them to charge you per-second billing and rip hundreds of thousands of rands using a service that is meant to be included in your tariff. (By the way, in the UK, if you phone directory enquiries, the phone is answered instantly and your query is normally resolved in one minute. And it is free!)

None of those firms out there is your friend. Rather, they are ruthless businesses that are massively self-interested and could not care less about the public or their customers.

There is a business opportunity out there for somebody who is honest.