Anyone got VAC banned by using cheats?

If you cheat over a long period of time you will almost certainly get banned. With a private cheat you can avoid the vast majority of detections and probably go undetected for years, but you never know when Valve will push a new update that you could not predict. For example, a while after CSGO was released, they added the "untrusted" bans which are triggered by a server side anti-cheat that can detect certain features. It was impossible to predict that Valve would implement this, so even many people who used private cheats got banned for certain detectable features which were totally undetected before. I personally have not been VAC banned because I've only ever used cheats to experiment and learn about them over a short period of time, but I know other people who have used cheats for years, and almost all of them got banned at some point.