Chess.com closes 100k accounts monthly for fair play violations

Chess.com today revealed details about how many accounts it closes down in the average month due to cheating and other fair play violations. According to its findings, it closes roughly 100,000 accounts per month, which is about 0.3% of the site’s total accounts, with most of them being recently created accounts. According to the site’s Fair Play team, the number of accounts used for cheating has increased at the same rate as users are signing up to play, but the age of the accounts has decreased.

The platform revealed more details about the accounts closed, noting that the number of games played for each closed account has dropped in recent months. Successful screening procedures mean that violating accounts are caught before they can go against a larger number of legitimate players, but the platform also notes that the number can go lower.

International Master Kassa Korley, the site’s communications advisor and senior member of its Fair Play team, said of the closures: “One of our principal challenges as a team is understanding evolving trends and patterns in account behavior so that we can identify and close accounts (more quickly) that are cheating. One can analyze closed accounts in a myriad of ways, but one factor stands out more appreciably than many others—account age. Nearly 40% of accounts that are closed are no more than 2 weeks old! In short, new accounts make up a plurality of closures on site.”

Korley adds that Chess.com is looking into new ways to catch cheaters before they can encounter other, legitimate players. “Given that new accounts make up a plurality of accounts closed for cheating, we’ve considered exploring additions to our matchmaking system in pool play where players need to establish themselves with more clean games on site against other newer accounts before playing more established accounts.” They also note that this approach could have its drawbacks as well.