The Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, has revealed how the Board uncovered more than 1,500 fake albino candidates who attempted to manipulate its facial recognition system during the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
Speaking in Abuja, Oloyede said the Board detected a disturbing trend in which candidates and their accomplices deployed advanced artificial intelligence tools to blend the facial features of two individuals, creating synthetic images designed to mimic the appearance of albinos in order to bypass biometric verification.
“Some individuals attempted to cheat by falsely declaring themselves as albino in a bid to exploit facial recognition vulnerabilities,” he explained. “They are not albinos. It is because 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.”
The scheme was uncovered after JAMB noticed unusual registration patterns during the 2025 UTME enrollment process. Oloyede said the anomaly became glaring when the number of self-declared albino candidates surged to unprecedented levels.
“We have never had even up to 100 albinos in any year. But this year, we have 1,787 albinos,” he disclosed.
He further revealed that a single registration centre recorded an alarmingly 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 breakthrough came after a suspect in custody provided crucial 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.”
He cited a specific incident in Benin City, Edo State, where a dark-complexioned man was apprehended after falsely claiming to be an albino.
“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,” he remarked.
Explaining how AI-powered impersonation works, Oloyede said, “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 intensifying its biometric verification processes and remains determined to expose and prosecute examination cheats and their collaborators.
