The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has lured the operators of Computer Based Test (CBT) centres involved in the ongoing Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) registration scam to their headquarters and handed them to security agents for prosecution.
This happened Wednesday in Bwari, Abuja after cross examinations of the operators by JAMB registrar, Professor Is-shaq Oloyede.
Oloyode had invited the unsuspecting operators to stakeholders’ dialogue in JAMB corporate headquarters only for them be interrogated on various degrees of fraud they had committed in the registration process.
The overwhelming evidences JAMB officials had tendered against their CBT partners included sets of laptops that the JAMB supervisors had earlier confiscated from the dubious centres.
Earlier, JAMB had revoked licenses of 11 CBT centres and blacklisted them. The operators of those centres probably thinking that JAMB was going resolve the issues with them came all the way from the six geopolitical zones and 36 states of the federation and FCT only to be arrested.
According to the statistics presented, JAMB officials seized 25 computer sets from the South-south; 8 from South-east; 5 from Southwest; 9 from the North-central and one from the North-east.
The registrar said that in the 2019 UTME, their attention was focused on fraudulent activities of students but they found that the activities of the operators were more important in 2020, therefore beamed their search light on CBT centres and found massive fraud in the registration process across the six geopolitical zones and 36 states and FCT.
“Last time we devoted our time to arrest students but this year we will focus on CBT centre operators
“We can track fraudsters even to their fathers’ houses,” Oloyode said.
One of the operators was identified by the registrar as one who had been previously caught for multiple registrations by security agents but was later forgiven and asked to write a letter of undertaking for good behaviour which he did not keep.
The visibly angry registrar said that an average parent in Nigeria would not want his child to wait on the queue for a second, therefore prefers short cut to normal process of registration.
“A prima facie case of cyber crimes has been established. All candidates who had been wrongly registered by these fraudsters should be aware that they will not be allowed to write the 2020 UTME.
“In our Weekly Bulletin, the centres that were blacklisted are shown there. Students should avoid patronising them. They should not give their registration number to anybody, not even to their parents.”
But most operators who were taken by surprise argued that they had not done anything illegal.
When the registrar was asked whether JAMB would reregister the innocent candidates who were affected by the cyber fraud by the operators, he said doing that (reregistering the candidates) would cause more confusion, but promised that something might be done to save the candidates,
Some of the centres blacklisted and their operators consequently arrested include Federal Polytechnic, Boni Haruna road in Mubi, Adamawa state; Dialogue Computer Institute, Katsina; A-Pagen Consolidated Services Limited CBT centre, Port Harcourt, Rivers state, Rise-wise CBT centre, Triton International School, Masaka, Nasarawa state, Mega Data View Computers, Oguta road, Anambra state, among others.
