Twenty people have been taken into custody by security personnel for allegedly hacking the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board’s (JAMB) computer-based 2025 unified tertiary matriculation examination (UTME).
Agents from the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) and Department of State Services (DSS) detained the individuals in Abuja, the country’s capital, according to Channels Television.
According to the article, the suspects are members of a syndicate that is said to consist of more than 100 individuals who specialise in breaking into the computer servers of testing organisations such as the National Examinations Council (NECO) and JAMB.
The suspects have admitted to sabotaging the exam to discredit JAMB and deter students from using CBT for upcoming tests administered by NECO and the West African Examination Council (WAEC), according to Channels Television, which cited security sources. Advertisement The suspects allegedly charged special candidates between N700,000 and N2 million to get high scores in the UTME, using private schools and colleges as their operational bases..
THE UTME CONTROVERSY
The conduct of this year’s UTME, which commenced in April nationwide, was characterised by complaints from candidates.
Many candidates said they were not able to sit for the exam due to being posted to far-flung centres.
When JAMB released the UTME results on May 9, a breakdown showed that more than 78 percent of candidates scored less than 200 marks out of the 400 maximum points obtainable.
This spurred protests that questioned the overall integrity of the examination process.
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During a press conference on May 14, Ishaq Oloyede, JAMB registrar, admitted to a technical error that compromised the integrity of the results in 157 centres nationwide.
Oloyede said the results of 379,997 candidates were affected by the technical error.
The JAMB registrar added that the board discovered discrepancies linked to faulty server updates in its Lagos and south-east zones, which led to the failure to upload candidates’ responses during the first three days of the examination.
The examination body has since conducted a resit examination for the affected candidates.
