But at the same time, I feel like this creates opportunities for enterprising individuals. How hard could it be to feed fake data into said dongle and enjoy the lower cost?

Of course, I’d much rather prefer that stuff like this didn’t exist to start with. The older I get the less patience I have for messing with this junk. All of my cars are now idiot-cars thanks to the death of 3g, and I pull antennas and SIM cards ever since the onstar eavesdropping scandal.