I couldn't get an exact answer to this question, but I think the answer is that it's prevalent enough to be bothered by it. Chess.com even has a private forum dedicated to the discussion of online cheating in chess (you need to submit a request to be admitted into the forum, and there are some restrictions--like having been a member on the site for at least one month--but overall it's easy to gain access). Chess.com also employs two full-time employees whose only task is to research and prevent cheating on that site. Similarly, both lichess and the Internet Chess Club have systems in place to detect cheating (sometimes doing automatic checks while the game is being played).
Five Percent?
The question about cheating prevalence has been asked several times over the years on multiple forums (like here). One user estimated the prevalence at 5%; another user said that a chess.com employee told them that 70% of games involve cheating (that's just hearsay, and 70% does sound pretty implausible). Yet another user said that the prevalence is "considerably higher" than 5% if your rating is high enough (1800+). One lichess user who is a National Master mentions on reddit that looking through his history of games in the classical category (8+ minutes), “about 80% of my losses were to people that subsequently had their accounts closed for cheating”
The 5% figure is one that seems to come back in forum posts. This figure was also mentioned by one of the lichess developers on reddit, 2 years ago:
About 1.2k accounts are make on lichess each day, and each day some 50 or more get marked (this number is set to increase as our detection system has just become fully operational). So if we assume that all cheaters use new accounts, about 4-5% of new accounts are cheaters. This figure has remained about the same since I started on the site and there were half as many new accounts made each day.
It's far less likely for a cheater to be using an older account, so that figure drops dramatically once they've played a hundred or more games.
Miscellaneous Stuff about Cheating in Chess
- At least one person has proposed a hypothesis test to detect cheating in online chess, and one International Master (also an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University at Buffalo) used statistics on the case of Borislav Ivanov, accused of cheating at the 2012 Zadar Open.
- Wikipedia has an entry for cheating in chess. Among other events recorded there, one grandmaster was stripped of his GM title for cheating, though he was allowed to keep his IM title.
- Chessbase.com has a 5-part series on the history of cheating in chess.
- GM Vladislav Tkachiev shows on YouTube just how easy to cheat with an accomplice using an earpiece in a video called How I Became a Cheater.
- There used to be a user on lichess, who was later banned, with the nickname IMaDirtyCheater, who made it very clear that he was cheating; his profile read:
I cheat, it should be obvious!
Really obvious...
- Some users have written programs to cheat directly from the same window the game is being played on; one such example is shown in a YouTube video on a lichess bullet game (I don't provide the link to the video because the description contains a link to the program, which is freely available on github). The resulting board looks like this, with the move recommended by the engine being indicated through a dark square (starting destination) and red square (ending destination):
My Recent Encounters with Cheaters
I recently started streaming games with longer time controls on Twitch, and as luck would have it, my first 2 games were played against cheaters! (So we're 0 for 2!) Both players were later banned from lichess. I lost both games pretty quickly, and both opponents played their part very fast (adding to the misery). Here are both games, available on my YouTube channel:
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