Originally published on the Trueyy blog: trueyy.com/resources/why-cheating-surged. 7 min read.
Interview cheating is not new. What changed after 2023 is that it became easy, instant, and almost invisible. Three forces lined up at once: a free expert-level answer engine, an interview that now happens on the candidate's own laptop, and a wave of tools built specifically to beat it.
The catalyst: an answer engine in everyone's pocket
ChatGPT launched on November 30, 2022. Within two months it had an estimated 100 million monthly users, the fastest-growing consumer application in history at the time, and it kept climbing to 400 million weekly users by early 2025. Overnight, every candidate had a tool that could produce a clean, confident answer to almost any interview question.
The opportunity: the interview moved onto the candidate's machine
The pandemic made remote interviewing the default. 82% of employers adopted virtual interviews, and 93% planned to keep using them. That convenience came with a blind spot: the interview now runs inside Zoom, Meet, or Teams on hardware the company does not control, and right next to a second screen, a phone, or a hidden overlay.
The tools: from second screen to funded startups
The cheating stack matured fast.
- ChatGPT on a second screen came first. In an early-2024 experiment, candidates using ChatGPT passed 73% of verbatim coding questions, and not a single interviewer raised a cheating concern.
- Interview Coder turned it into a product: a desktop overlay that reads the coding screen and streams a full solution, hidden from screen sharing. Its creator, Roy Lee, was suspended from Columbia after using it.
- Cluely rebranded that idea as "cheat on everything," raised $5.3M, then a $15M Series A from a16z, and markets itself as undetectable in meetings.
- Final Round AI raised $6.88M for an "Interview Copilot" that feeds real-time answers on Zoom, Teams, and Meet.
This is now a funded category, not a fringe hack.
The surge, in numbers
The behavior followed the tools. By 2025, one in five professionals admitted secretly using AI during interviews, and 55% called it "the new norm." Gartner now predicts that one in four candidate profiles will be fake by 2028, and Greenhouse found that 65% of hiring managers have caught applicants using AI deceptively, with 74% more concerned than a year earlier. In one extreme case, security firm KnowBe4 unknowingly hired a North Korean operative who passed four video interviews using a stolen identity.
Why old proctoring stopped working
Traditional proctoring was built for timed exams, not conversations. Lockdown browsers work by taking over the device and forcing a sealed full-screen exam, but a live interview happens inside a normal video call, so there is nothing to lock down. Worse, the new overlay tools are designed to defeat the obvious countermeasure: both Interview Coder and Cluely advertise that they stay invisible during screen share, and independent reporting confirms they evade screen-detection on Zoom and Meet.
That is the gap. The interview format is fine; the assumption that you can see what is on the other side of the call is what broke. Closing it takes signal-based detection that reads the conversation in real time, which is exactly what Trueyy is built to do, consent-first.