…vows to prosecute owners of affected centres
Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board says it has blacklisted 22 Computer-Based Test centres for allegedly defrauding 11, 823 candidates to the tune of N59million.
JAMB Registrar, Prof Is-haq Oloyede, accused the CBT operators of overcharging candidates by more than N200 as service charge for the centres to effect correction on profile.
They also allegedly bypassed the One-time password required to initiate such changes.
He said any centre that shared the same ownership with the delisted centres would be suspended from all JAMB activities.
The JAMB registrar disclosed this during a meeting with operators of the delisted centres on Thursday in Abuja.
Oloyede said the board had concrete proof of the infractions as it made undercover payments to the centres to detect the fraud that was perpetrated by the operators of the centres.
He said the board had reversed the changes done illegally by the affected candidates and that the money paid to JAMB to effect the changes remained intact on their profiles.
Oloyede added that the affected CBT centres owners would be prosecuted.
The JAMB registrar said, “The purpose of calling this meeting is to interact with 22 of you that have grossly violated the prescription of the board, particularly during COVID-19 and those who have done things not expected to do, thereby endangering the lives of candidates that they were supposed to protect.
“Not only that, we have discovered that the 22 of you have also defrauded candidates by collecting from them more than you are expected to collect and doing certain things that would bypass the normal process and procedure.
“Some of you were collecting N3, 000 or N5, 000 from candidates; what you have collected is over N59 million.”
The JAMB registrar advised the concerned candidates to change their passwords to avoid further damage following exposure of the secret code to operators of the now blacklisted CBT centres.
He expressed regret that “all the owners of the affected CBT centres were from one section of the country,” saying such misconduct portended danger to the country.
A representative of Duntro CBT centre, David Ugochukwu, blamed the illegal act on his technical staff, saying that they had been sacked.
The affected centres include, Bright Stars, Aba, Abia State (68 candidates); Flourish Computer Centre, Akwa Ibom State, 105; Ibom-E-Library, Akwa Ibom, 12; Chukwuemeka Odumegwu University, Igbariam, Anambra State, 661; Deacons Digital Solutions Ltd, 96; Federal Poly, Oko, 314 and Mega Dataview, Onitsha, 733.