The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has barred Ejikeme Mmesoma from writing jamb for the next three years for manually inflating her scores from 249 to 362 and parading herself as the top scorer for the just concluded UTME examination.

JAMB explains how Ejikeme’s UTME result was forged

Addressing the issue in an interview with Leadership newspaper on Monday, July 3, 2023, Dr Fabian Benjamin, JAMB’s spokesperson said contrary to Ejikeme’s claim, no candidate scored 362 in the 2023 UTME. He therefore, stated that JAMB’s investigation on the issue showed that Ejikeme forged a text message and a result slip to support her claim.

“If I tell you the level of investigation that we have conducted, we have the 55019, our USSD code. We use that 55019 to communicate with candidates during registration, examination and release of results.

“Immediately after this result was released, she checked her result, instead of sending “RESULT TO 55019, she sent a message “Post UTME to 55019 but the machine now sent her results because the phone number she is using is a unique identifier, so it sent her result which was 249.

“She now doctored that result — because that one is a text message so it’s very easy to doctor. So she doctored the results, put the marks the way she wanted and sent them back to 55019 so the code also returned her original results again,” Fabian explained.

The JAMB spokesperson further said the candidate sent the message four times and she kept getting 249 as her result, adding that the result slip Ejikeme presented was obtained outside JAMB’s database.

“So, she went outside the database to obtain that slip, but unfortunately for her sponsors or her managers, they didn’t know that there are security devices attached to each slip that is printed and the QR code is one of them. There are about seventeen of them which I wouldn’t want to mention on air.

“Unfortunately for her again, for 2023, we didn’t use the design she is holding. What she is holding is different from what we are using for 2023,” Fabian said.

Contrary to JAMB’s claim, Ejikeme has defended herself, saying she didn’t forge her UTME result.