Cheating/fraud detection analysis and remediation

Hello all,

I hope everyone is having a good end of year and holiday season!

I have received several messages from Chess.com similar to this one, and I received another just this week:

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We have detected that one or more of your recent opponents has violated our Fair Play Policy. As compensation for potentially unfair rating losses, we adjusted your following ratings (".... plus 8 points"):

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I believe the fair play policy is a good step and I am glad that Chess.com is working to combat players who cheat by using computer (or other) assistance.

However, it appears that the policy is only to "give back" the points lost to a player who was affected by cheating, not to have the match forfeit such that it's as though the player affected won the match.   While that's a good step, the 30 minutes or more spent playing the match was essentially wasted then.

Would it not be more fair, and penalize cheaters more directly, to not (for example) reset the affected player's rating by 8 points, but to reset the affected player by 16 points (as though they won the match, so give back the lost points plus award the win) and deduct 16 points from the cheater?

Thank you in advance for any thoughts from the community or from Chess.com staff.

Cheers and happy holidays,

TYJackie47

Cheaters have their accounts closed, so you can't really affect them more.

You could suggest this in the Cheating Forum thread.

P.S. jbf, you had already posted what I wanted to post! Grrrrr!!! Something about deducting 16 rating points being useless.

We should have to use our real names.

I get the same messages from Chess.com. I also think it affects my own rating as I can pretty well tell hands down when people are cheating. I never have I just play I've googled it and how I usually determine a cheater is when you get paired against someone with a lower score then you and you can't get a move in edgewise they are ahead of you on every move you make, I went down to 3 minute blitz games to try and get away from cheating because in higher time frame games I could tell people were cheating by perhaps consulting a chess engine on the moves and their moves would be slow and at the end when it appeared they did not have time to enter moves because the clock was running out their game would just fall apart, Now on 3 minute Blitz games cheating seems rampant this last week. My score has dropped from 675 to under 500 and I get paired with someone with a rating of 425 and they are all over me? Maybe I'll just start playing the bots. You know when you're playing a real player and they miss a mistake you made.

Cheating Forum