The Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, has explained how the Board uncovered over 1,500 fake albino candidates who attempted to beat its facial recognition system during the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).

Speaking in Abuja, Oloyede said the Board uncovered a disturbing trend where candidates and their accomplices used advanced AI tools to blend facial features of two individuals, producing synthetic images that mimicked the appearance of albinos in a bid to bypass the facial recognition system.

“Some individuals attempted to cheat by falsely declaring themselves as albino in a bid to exploit facial recognition vulnerabilities,” he said. “They are not albinos. It is becausee the AI that they were using had certain features such that if they do not declare themselves as albino on our forms, you will look critically more,” he said.

According to him, the discovery came after JAMB noticed suspicious registration patterns during the 2025 UTME enrollment process, adding that the anomaly became glaring when the number of self-declared albino candidates shot up drastically.

“We have never had even up to 100 albinos in any year. But this year, we have 1,787 albinos,” he disclosed.

Oloyede added that the fraud was further exposed when a single registration centre recorded an unusually high number of albino declarations.

“Out of 2 million candidates that registered in centres across the country, we found out that one centre alone had registered 450 out of this figure, as if all albinos in Africa decided to go to that particular centre,” he noted.

The Registrar stated that the breakthrough came after a suspect in custody offered vital information.

“When one of those arrested gave us information that, ‘look, I will tell you what really happened,’ and he did,” Oloyede said. “So, we went after all those who claimed to be albinos only to find out that all the genuine albinos who registered for the 2025 UTME are less than 250.”

Citing a particular case in Benin City, Edo State, he said, “You could all see the dark-complexioned man arrested in Benin City claiming to be an albino. How do you become albino? But that is one of their strategies.”

Explaining how AI-powered impersonation works, Oloyede noted that to declare that they are albino, “what they do in blending is that if you want to impersonate someone, they will take the picture of the two of you together and then blend it. When you look at the picture, it will also look like you. That’s what AI is doing now. It’s picture blending.”

He assured that JAMB Is stepping up its biometric verification processes and remains committed to exposing and prosecuting examination cheats and their collaborators. (Nigerian Tribune)

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