WAEC chases exams fraudsters

West African Examination Council (WAEC) has released over 100 personal contacts of persons who promised to change results of candidates who failed their examination.

Social media has been awashed with rumours that WAEC’s system had been hacked.

However, the Head of WAEC’s office in Ghana, Rev. Sam Nii Ollenu, denied the reports, adding that some fraudsters have been arrested and handed over to the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI).

“Usually when the results are getting closer to the time of release, you’ll find some of these things. Over and over again, we’ve been sending messages to our candidate [those who take part in exams] that they should be wary of such fraudsters. They do that and then they dupe unsuspecting candidates and it looks as if many of the candidates have become vulnerable. So what they’re saying that our system has been hacked is not true because our systems are well secured.”

He added, “we’ve also seen that when the candidates pay the money to the fraudsters they’ll either shut down the numbers they’re using completely or they’ll download the candidates original result slip and doctor it using Adobe Photoshop and then post it back to the candidates that these are their new results, then they go back and check and realise it is fake.

“We’ve arrested a number of fraudsters and handed them over to the BNI, earlier we were able to lift about 100 phone numbers that are being used to perpetrate this fraud and we’ve made a formal report to CID headquarters for action to begin on that. We’ve taken action, people shouldn’t yield to these things, the way we operate is not through Whatsapp and these mediums, we go straight to the press and make a press statement and then you can take it up from there,” Rev. Ollenu told Joy FM.