Oloyede talks tough as JAMB parades cybercafé operator, nine others for seizing details of ad hoc staff and collecting their allowances

The Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, has warned scammers and other merchants of fraud to stay away from the Board as its system is designed to get anybody who perpetuates or attempts to act against established norms.

The declaration was made when the Board paraded ten persons who seized the details of some ad hoc staff of the Board, deleted their particulars and inserted their accounts and received allowances meant for this category of staff, according to JAMBulleting made available to The Shield Online on Monday.

The publication reported that “  It would be recalled that the Board had asked its ad hoc staff, right after the completion of their training for the 2020 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) exercise, to provide their account details online. A platform outside the official website was created for such. However, some of these ad hoc staff had, instead of providing the required information on a secure system, opted to visit cybercafés.

“Unknown to some of the ad hoc staff, one of these cybercafes, named Saltee Cybercafe located in Kaduna, had installed a hidden application on its systems. This application, which is known as a keylogger, monitors all entries made on a computer system surreptitiously thereby giving hackers access to clients’ data.

“Consequently, after the conclusion of a targeted client’s transaction on the compromised computer system, the fraudulent cybercafé operator would access the client’s profile, edit it and replace the payment details with his/her own. Thus, receiving payment for an exercise which he /s h e had not participated in. However, luck ran out on the perpetrators as the in-built security feature of this payment platform revealed their identities leading to their arrest.”

JAMBulletin added that “For purpose of clarity, this whole exercise has nothing to do with the hacking of the Board’s website as being speculated as the compromised platform was simply a convenient payment portal created to receive payment details.”

The weekly publication of the Office of JAMB Registrar stressed that “And as a testimony to the robustness of the security architecture of the Board, the fraud was detected almost immediately and the ringleader of the group, Mr Sahabi Zubair, was apprehended leading to the arrest of his co-conspirators. All the culprits confessed to the crime and expressed regret for their action even as they expressed shock that they could be fished out so easily.

“ The Registrar, Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, revealed that the Board had embedded fail-safe mechanisms in all its systems and these are capable of taking care of such developments knowing that some bad eggs in the society would want to try the resolve of the Board. He advised would be scammers to steer clear of the Board so as not to succumb to the series of booby-traps in its processes.

Other accomplices of Zubair nabbed along with him were: 1.Usman Muhammad 2. Yakubu Mustapha Abubakar 3. Alhussaini MamiYaro Musa 4. Auwal Muhammed Ladan 5. Nasiru Muhammed Abubakar 6. Abdulsalam Abdulrazak 7. Bilikisu Saka 8. Izideeen Nuhu 9. Ibrahim Bello Ismail.