The perception of cheating levels is orders of magnitude more than the actual amount. The vast majority of games and players are clean.
https://support.chess.com/article/648-what-do-i-need-to-know-about-fair-play-on-chess-com
https://www.chess.com/article/view/online-chess-cheating
https://www.chess.com/article/view/chesscom-update-may-2025#FairPlay
The site closed more than 116,000 accounts in April for fair play violations and has a full team of staff working on reports along with some automated systems for detection.
https://www.chess.com/article/view/fair-play
That said, discussions of cheating, potential cheating, or cheat detection are not allowed in the general forums. If you would like to discuss join the following club
https://www.chess.com/club/cheating-forum
From how I've come to understand chesscom, if a cheater has been caught and banned you will get refunded "chesscom ELO" for playing them, but only if you currently have lower ELO than you did when you played them. An issue with this approach is that it leads to potential "ELO suppression", and here's why:
Let's say I'm 1000 ELO, and I play a cheater at 1000 ELO who beats me. Then I will drop to 992 ELO. If that cheater is caught I will immediately be refunded said 8 ELO points.
However, if I continue playing and beat a bunch of other people then I will have an ELO above 1000, and I won't be refunded the points when the cheater gets caught. If the cheater never gets caught the issue obviously remains the same; they have stolen ELO points and they will never be given back.
8 ELO points here and there doesn't really matter, since it is only the value of a single game of chess. When it is aggregated however, it starts to become an issue. There will be a lot of points that are never "returned to the pool", with the effect being lower ratings for all affected players. If one acknowledges that cheating is a big problem in online chess, and that a lot of ELO points will never get refunded, then this will of course lead to suppression of chesscom ELO. Some like to describe it as "ELO inflation", which is a stupid and completely incorrect term. ELO deflation would be correct, since the value of ELO has gone up whereas the number of ELO points have decreased.
Either way, my point is that cheating likely leads to ELO suppression and hence ELO deflation (what chess content creators call ELO inflation because they don't know what inflation means).