I assume you realise that software purchased from China and often Ebay is pirated. If you paid less than $100 for any FS software you can just about guarantee it's pirated. As such you'll never be able to go on-line with it and if you should, there's a good chance your details could be logged and lead to heavy fines and even jail time. That may not happen, but there's always a chance it could. The actual owners of the copyrighted software you're illegally using can't do much about it being sold and used in China, but once it's shipped to western countries there's always the chance of legal proceedings being the real thing.
If you must use pirated software I recommend you keep it to yourself and not advertise the fact you're using illegal dongles. I went down the pirated dongle path, but after a scare from a well known Sim manufacturer I burned about 6 or 7 dongles and associated DVDs. I now fly nothing but legitimately purchased sims. Pirated software can't normally be used on-line, but one sim can be by using modified software. The problem is that by being on-line your IP address is available and as such gives the owner of the software the ability of contacting your ISP and your home address etc. Basically, if they want you, they'll get you, very easily.
By the way, you've probably seen one very popular flight sim manufacturer stop updating their software. The biggest factor associated with their decision to cease updating was piracy. They got to the stage where it simply wasn't a viable business. It's pretty obvious why. Yes you can cry. "It's so expensive" but it's only because of people using pirated sofrware, Less paying customers meant they had to raise their prices. How would you feel if the entire Flight Sim world collapsed? No doubt many of you couldn't care less, but that's being rather mean to all the people who do pay for their sims. I recall using all the pathetic excuses for using pirated software, but in the end it's only us who suffer.
