Magicious

How to play Magicious

IPI now has until this Friday to find a new lawyer to carry the six-case workload Hasselback had, but will most likely use this as an excuse to delay the ongoing legal battles. It won’t get very far with that, though, and perhaps Judge Kennedy expected IPI to try something. She added in her ruling that the attorney’s exit “may cause some delay, [but] that delay is not so much so that it would cause significant prejudice or adversely and materially affect the plaintiff.”

This particular lawsuit involving Fox Financial, one of a growing list IPI is battling, centers on an arrangement the company made with a third party, Forson Holdings. That entity had leased property from Fox in 2016, but fell behind. IPI had signed as a guarantor of that lease agreement and, as such, was responsible for covering Forson in the event payments weren’t made. However, it decided it didn’t need to follow the terms of the contract.

It seems like not a day goes by without IPI coming under fire for something else. The company’s chairwoman, Cui Li Jie, has already found herself in trouble and was previously held in contempt of court, but now has another black mark beside her name. She has been found in contempt again, this time for allegedly perjuring herself in court. A lawyer representing employees suing IPI and Cui produced evidence proving she had lied under oath, and Chief Judge Ramona V. Manglona has now agreed. She issued her ruling this morning, with Cui only able to respond, through an interpreter, “I don’t know anything, I don’t understand English.”

How to play Magicious

In Sweden, Spelinspektionen recently flagged affiliates and social media as key channels for black market advertising and how affiliate networks redirect search traffic towards unlicensed operators.

Regulators have so far focused mainly on monitoring paid advertising. In Germany, the GGL credited an updated Google ad policy with reducing black market visibility. Yet, it acknowledged that illegal operators could still achieve visibility in organic search through SEO manipulation. 

This points to a wider shift towards addressing organic search signals and domain-level practices such as doorway pages, an issue also raised in the UK, where research has linked black market migration to search-driven promotion and SEO exploitation.

How to play Magicious

“Our role as a regulator is not to stand in the way of innovation, but to help create the certainty and confidence needed for innovation to flourish responsibly,” Mizzi said.

The charter does not create new regulatory obligations and was designed to complement legislation including the EU AI Act and GDPR.

Instead, it proposed a risk-based approach. It suggested lighter controls on use cases such as coding assistants, but strong checks on customer-facing functions, particularly those involving fraud and responsible gambling.