Originally Posted by RChung

So, I'm not sure I want to get into "easily" vs "hard" but this goes back to the assessment of power meter accuracy: if you have the full data file, you can often tell whether there's an error in offset or an error in slope. There are also other things that you can look for that aren't related to either offset or slope. Roughly speaking, there are errors that are sort of hardware-related, transmission-related, and software-processing-related. Each type of error can leave behind certain kinds of "fingerprints." So that's about inadvertent inaccuracy in a power meter, not about purposeful cheating. But you can see how detection of errors can be related to detection of cheating. A very clever, very dedicated, very smart cheater can handle all of those things but most cheaters aren't quite that clever or smart.