Am I wrong about Tag Markets? Maybe, (I don’t think I am) but is a risk I’m willing to take.” — Silvio Fortunato
Sonic AI was where this investigation started, but the further I followed it, the more interesting the people promoting it became.
That trail eventually led me to Silvio Fortunato, a Portuguese affiliate marketer and self-described system builder who says he has been involved in network marketing since the 1990s and digital marketing for more than 25 years.
I had never dealt with Silvio before this investigation. I found him because he was actively promoting Sonic AI Gold, with a personal referral link and videos walking people through creating an IB account, registering with TAG Markets, making a deposit and activating the Sonic AI copy-trading strategy. This wasn’t somebody standing on the sidelines discussing an investment product. Silvio confirmed to me directly that he is an affiliate.
But as I started pulling the opportunity apart, Sonic AI became increasingly difficult to describe as an AI trading business in its own right. Silvio has now told me that Sonic AI is simply the name of one human trading team available through TAG Markets. According to him, the traders don’t use AI to execute their trades and he doesn’t know why “AI” is even in the name. He also confirmed that SonicAIgold.com is not an official TAG Markets website. It is, in his words, a “team funnel” created by independent affiliates to promote TAG Markets.
That changed the direction of my investigation.
The promotional journey may begin with Sonic AI Gold, but ultimately it leads people towards TAG Markets — opening an account, depositing money and copying trades. There is also a financial incentive for affiliates along that journey. Silvio says TAG Markets pays a CPA for bringing investors and several types of bonuses across up to ten levels. Sonic AI Gold therefore appears to operate as a multi-level affiliate recruitment and onboarding funnel sitting in front of the broker.
Then I started investigating Silvio himself.
I discovered a promotional career stretching back decades, a long relationship with fellow affiliate marketer Paulo Barroso, and eventually a previous opportunity called Beurax. That history mattered because Silvio and Paulo had publicly discussed the importance of their due diligence back in 2021. Five years later, with the same two men involved in promoting another financial opportunity, I found myself asking essentially the same question: what had Silvio independently verified before putting his name and reputation behind this one?
To his credit, he answered me. After a lengthy WhatsApp exchange, I sent Silvio a formal right-of-reply document containing 30 questions. He took the time to read them and eventually returned an eight-page response explaining why he believes TAG Markets is legitimate, what happened with Beurax, what he considers acceptable risk and why he believes everyone joining through his team must ultimately conduct their own due diligence.
His response deserves to be represented fairly.
It also gave me considerably more to investigate.
Who Is Silvio Fortunato?
Silvio Fortunato presents himself as a veteran of the network-marketing and affiliate world. On his own website, he describes himself as a “Master of Multiple Income Streams” and a system builder, saying he has been creating systems since 2000 to help ordinary people become “Super Affiliates.” His LinkedIn profile goes further, claiming more than 25 years in digital marketing, experience building large teams, creating complete support systems and earning seven figures from some of the offers he promoted.
That background matters because Silvio isn’t presenting himself as a newcomer who stumbled across Sonic AI a few weeks ago. His entire business identity has been built around funnels, lead generation, duplication, affiliate offers and team-building systems. His own marketing repeatedly focuses on creating systems that other people can follow, rather than relying on individual sales ability. One of his current projects, LWS, is marketed around generating qualified leads, automating follow-up and helping network marketers recruit at scale.
He also remains active in network marketing today. Silvio says his My LW System was developed specifically to support his team inside LifeWave, while his wider promotional history stretches through multiple affiliate and MLM opportunities dating back many years. In a 2025 post, he celebrated receiving an affiliate award and described a formula built around team support systems, the right community and the right affiliate offer, while promoting a plan he said could take somebody from zero to $10,000 per month.
That is why his involvement with Sonic AI Gold caught my attention.
Silvio’s value to an opportunity isn’t simply that he can post a referral link. His business has been built around creating the infrastructure that helps other affiliates recruit, duplicate and grow teams. When somebody with that level of experience decides an opportunity is worth putting through one of those systems, the obvious question is not simply what he is promoting.
It is how he decided it was safe enough to promote in the first place.
A Career Built Around Recruitment Systems
The deeper I went into Silvio Fortunato’s history, the clearer one pattern became: he has spent years building systems around recruitment, lead generation and duplication.
His earlier footprint includes projects such as The Magnet System, which Silvio’s own current LWS material traces back to around 2008, and PTSender, an autoresponder platform launched in the Portuguese market in 2009 with Silvio identified as CEO. Later came Empower Network, where archived material identifies him as an international affiliate and describes him building teams and support systems around the opportunity. His YouTube archive also shows years of content connected to network-marketing businesses, including Jeunesse and more recently LifeWave.
What interests me is not simply the list of companies. It is the methodology that keeps repeating.
Silvio’s own language has been remarkably consistent over the years: build the system, generate the leads, automate the follow-up, make the process duplicatable, and give the team something they can plug into. His current LWS project says much the same thing today, promising network marketers a way to generate qualified prospects, recruit more efficiently and scale without relying on friends and family.
That approach can be powerful because it removes friction from recruitment. Instead of every affiliate having to explain an opportunity from scratch, the system does much of the work for them. A prospect sees the presentation, enters the funnel, receives the follow-up, and is directed towards the next step.
Silvio clearly understands that process very well.
That is also why his involvement in Sonic AI Gold matters more than the involvement of somebody who simply shares an occasional referral link. Silvio’s career has been built around creating the machinery that turns an opportunity into something other people can repeatedly promote.
And historically, not every opportunity attached to that machinery has ended well.
Beurax And The Due Diligence Question
The part of Silvio Fortunato’s history that matters most to this investigation is Beurax.
In March 2021, BehindMLM reported on a discussion involving Silvio and Paulo Barroso while Beurax was already in serious trouble. Paulo told viewers: “We’ve done our due-diligence before we put our names in Beurax. We don’t do things very lightly.” Silvio, meanwhile, was quoted saying that he had made a lot of money from the opportunity.
What makes that episode so relevant today is what happened next.
BehindMLM had already reported that Beurax’s supposed management included actors, and in the discussion Silvio appeared willing to give the operation the benefit of the doubt even after that problem had surfaced. He suggested there could be reasons why real people might want to hide behind actors in a sensitive international business. The important point is not BehindMLM’s opinion of that explanation. It is that Silvio and Paulo were publicly talking about having carried out due diligence while fundamental questions about who was actually running Beurax were still unresolved.
Then the promotional material started disappearing.
BehindMLM reported that Silvio removed the cited YouTube video shortly after its article appeared and later reported that he asked people to remove footage of him discussing Beurax. I have treated those claims as third-party reporting, not as something I independently witnessed at the time, which is why I put the issue directly to Silvio in my right-of-reply questions.
His response was much more candid than I expected.
Silvio described Beurax as “a horrible experience for me and for my team” and said it was so traumatic that he spent almost four years without promoting another opportunity of that kind. He also acknowledged making mistakes in the past by believing what companies told him about themselves and their business models.
I think he deserves credit for saying that.
But it also makes the present investigation impossible to separate from the past. If Beurax was serious enough to make Silvio step away for years, then the obvious question is what changed in his due-diligence process when he returned.
Five years ago, the language was that they had done their due diligence before putting their names behind Beurax.
Today, Silvio is once again putting his name behind a financial opportunity alongside Paulo Barroso.
So I wanted to know exactly what had been verified this time.
Five Years Later: Sonic AI Gold
Five years later, I found Silvio Fortunato and Paulo Barroso working together again, this time around Sonic AI Gold and TAG Markets.
The promotional material initially gives Sonic AI the appearance of a technology-driven trading product, but Silvio’s own explanation stripped away much of that impression. In his written response to me, he said Sonic AI is simply the name of one trading team available inside TAG Markets, which he says has more than 60 trader teams that clients can choose to copy. He also made something else very clear: the Sonic AI traders are human, not bots, and he does not know why “AI” is in the name.
That is a significant clarification because the branding does a lot of work before a prospective client ever reaches TAG Markets.
Silvio also confirmed that SonicAIgold.com is not an official TAG Markets website. He described it as a “team funnel” created by independent affiliates to help promote TAG Markets. That means Sonic AI Gold is not the broker, not the trading platform and not the entity with which the client ultimately opens the trading account. It is essentially the promotional layer sitting in front of TAG Markets, complete with presentations, referral links, onboarding instructions and an affiliate compensation structure.
The pathway becomes fairly easy to follow. A prospect encounters Sonic AI Gold, watches the presentation, receives an affiliate referral link, opens a TAG Markets account, funds it and then chooses to copy the Sonic trading strategy. Silvio’s own YouTube material walks people through that process, including creating an IB account, registering with TAG Markets, making a deposit and activating the copy-trading strategy.
And affiliates can be paid along the way.
Silvio says TAG Markets pays a CPA for bringing investors and several types of bonuses through up to ten levels, while the Sonic AI Gold material encourages affiliates to build teams and share the opportunity through their networks.
That makes Sonic AI Gold look much less like an independent AI trading company and much more like a multi-level affiliate acquisition funnel feeding clients into TAG Markets.
There was another unresolved issue. Earlier Sonic AI presentations described the strategy as being run by three German traders with around 15 years of experience, yet I still had not seen their names, independently verified professional histories or evidence showing where they had previously traded. Silvio’s later claim that TAG Markets has more than 60 trader teams only widened that question rather than answering it.
Who exactly are these traders, and what has been independently verified about them?
That question became even more important once I started following the money further into TAG Markets.
Following The Funnel To TAG Markets
Once I understood what Sonic AI Gold actually was, the investigation kept pulling me back to TAG Markets.
Silvio’s own explanation makes the relationship fairly straightforward. Sonic AI Gold is the promotional funnel. TAG Markets is where the client ultimately opens the trading account, where the deposit is made, where the copy-trading takes place and where the affiliate commissions are generated. Silvio says TAG Markets pays a CPA for bringing investors and several different bonuses through up to ten levels, while Sonic AI Gold provides the marketing system used to bring people into that structure.
That is also where some of the bigger claims begin. TAG Markets has promoted an Amplify concept using 12X language, while Sonic AI Gold material has referred to 24X amplification. I am deliberately not going too far into those mechanics here because TAG Markets deserves its own investigation. At this stage, I have not independently established precisely what that amplification represents economically or contractually, and I don’t want to describe it as conventional leverage without establishing that first.
I also raised a concern about whether activating Amplify required brokerage login credentials to pass through an affiliate or another person outside the customer’s direct relationship with TAG Markets. Silvio has now specifically corrected me on that point. According to him, customers do not need to provide their brokerage password or login credentials to an affiliate. He says that when copy trading is activated, the customer enters a token identifier, giving #aitech as an example, and the relevant arrangement is then activated automatically.
That is an important distinction, and I am happy to correct the record. I am not suggesting that TAG Markets requires customers to hand their brokerage passwords through an affiliate chain to activate Amplify. My remaining questions concern what the 12X and 24X amplification actually represents, what contractual conditions attach to it, and precisely how the token, CopyX strategy and affiliate relationship interact behind the scenes.
There are also regulatory questions I could not ignore. TAG Markets operates under a Mauritius regulatory framework, but its own website states that it is not authorised or regulated by any European Union regulatory authority and that EU clients do not receive EU investor-protection safeguards. Regulators in Austria and Luxembourg have also issued warnings concerning TAG Markets’ lack of authorisation to provide specified financial services in those jurisdictions.
Silvio’s position is that these warnings do not mean TAG Markets is a scam. He sees them primarily as jurisdictional issues and believes the company’s Mauritius regulation, trading infrastructure and disclosures give him enough confidence to participate. That is his view, and I have not declared TAG Markets a scam either.
But regulation was only one part of what I wanted to understand.
Silvio repeatedly pointed to TAG Markets’ own website, its disclaimers, MetaTrader 5, Myfxbook, his ability to withdraw money and the company’s claimed insurance and client numbers as reasons for his confidence. What I wanted to know was how much of that had been independently verified, rather than accepted from the company and the people promoting it.
Silvio has since offered to help put me directly in contact with somebody inside TAG Markets who can answer my remaining questions. I welcome that. TAG Markets should ultimately be the authoritative source for explaining how its own products, amplification arrangements, insurance, regulatory position and affiliate systems operate.
I had already approached TAG Markets directly without receiving the answers I was seeking. If Silvio can now facilitate access to somebody authorised to speak for the company, I am prepared to give TAG Markets another opportunity to respond.
Because ultimately, that became the central question I put to Silvio — and the question I now want TAG Markets itself to answer:
What has actually been independently verified?
I Asked Silvio To Explain His Due Diligence
Rather than speculate about what Silvio had or hadn’t checked, I asked him directly. What followed was a lengthy WhatsApp conversation in which he initially pointed me towards TAG Markets, its website and its disclaimers. At one point he told me that because TAG Markets was regulated, it had to obey strict compliance rules and that what it published on its website had to be true, reasoning that if the company falsely claimed to have insurance, for example, it could lose its licence.
I kept coming back to a narrower question: what had Silvio independently verified himself?
The conversation became heated at times. Silvio questioned my use of AI, accused me of wanting to write clickbait and challenged the fairness of my previous reporting on Paulo. But he also made an important request: instead of continuing a sprawling WhatsApp debate, he asked me to send him a complete list of questions and give him time to answer them.
So I did.
I prepared a formal 30-question right-of-reply document covering his affiliate compensation, Sonic AI, TAG Markets, regulation, the unnamed traders, insurance, his relationship with Paulo, Beurax and his previous due diligence. Silvio read it and, to his credit, sent me an eight-page written response. Plenty of people I investigate simply ignore questions like these. Silvio didn’t, and readers should know that.
His response also gave me a much clearer picture of what he regards as sufficient due diligence. Silvio pointed to TAG Markets being regulated in Mauritius, the trading being visible through MetaTrader 5, the Sonic strategy appearing on Myfxbook, his own experience making withdrawals, the company’s claim of 1.2 million clients and TAG Markets’ representation that client accounts have insurance coverage of up to $1 million. He said these factors gave him enough confidence to become both a client and an affiliate.
But there is an important distinction between checking that something exists and independently verifying the claims behind it.
For example, Silvio referred to the insurance disclosed by TAG Markets and asked rhetorically whether, if that insurance were false, the regulator would not simply turn off the company’s licence. Likewise, he reasoned that if significant withdrawal problems existed among a claimed 1.2 million clients, TAG Markets would have disappeared from the market long ago. Those arguments explain why Silvio believes the company is legitimate, but they do not independently establish that the client number is accurate, what the insurance actually covers, or who the people behind the Sonic trading strategy really are.
Some of my specific questions therefore remained unresolved. I still wasn’t given the identities and independently verifiable histories of the Sonic traders. Nor did his response provide the detailed evidence I had requested concerning their claimed experience, or fully resolve my questions around the legal basis for actively promoting TAG Markets to European residents.
Silvio nevertheless reached a clear conclusion from the information he had gathered.
He believes TAG Markets is a legitimate business and considers the risk acceptable.
The more interesting question was what responsibility he believed he carried when encouraging other people to make that same decision.
“Everyone Must Do Their Own Due Diligence”
Silvio’s response eventually revealed something more fundamental than whether he personally trusts TAG Markets. It revealed where he believes his responsibility ends and the responsibility of the people he recruits begins.
His position could hardly have been clearer. Silvio told me that every member of his team “SHOULD do their own” due diligence and should not make a decision based upon his research. He said he never gives financial advice, repeatedly tells people to use their own judgement and wrote: “I refuse to have responsibility in their own decision, there is no children here.” Elsewhere he repeated the same argument: people know there are risks, decide for themselves and “we are all adults here.”
There is truth in part of that argument. Anyone considering putting money into a trading platform should investigate it themselves. Sonic AI Gold also contains risk disclosures, and Silvio explicitly acknowledges two major risks: the broker could become insolvent and the traders could perform badly enough for clients to lose all their money. He says he makes no guarantees about future performance and considers copying Sonic AI an acceptable risk for himself.
But a disclaimer doesn’t make the promoter disappear from the transaction.
Silvio isn’t an anonymous customer who discovered TAG Markets and quietly decided to copy some trades. He is an experienced affiliate marketer who creates recruitment systems, publishes tutorials, supplies referral links and helps prospects navigate the process of registering, depositing and activating the strategy. He also acknowledges a compensation structure where affiliates can be rewarded for bringing investors and through bonuses extending up to ten levels.
That creates an obvious tension. You can tell somebody to conduct their own due diligence while simultaneously using your experience, reputation and marketing system to influence how they perceive an opportunity. The fact that the final decision belongs to the customer doesn’t erase the role played by the person who introduced them to it.
Silvio sees that differently. His position is that his own due diligence should not determine somebody else’s investment decision, because each person must make their own assessment.
For me, that is precisely why his due diligence matters.
When an experienced promoter decides an opportunity is credible enough to put in front of his audience, builds the pathway that helps people participate and can financially benefit when they do, I believe it is reasonable to ask what he checked before opening that door.
The 99% Claim And What Remains Unanswered
Silvio also challenged the idea that Beurax should define a career stretching back decades. I agree with him on that. One failed opportunity should not automatically erase everything somebody has done before or since. But during our correspondence, Silvio made a much broader claim about his track record, writing that “99% of the business I promote they were good business models that don’t defraud their clients.”
Because 99% sounded remarkably precise, I gave Silvio another opportunity to substantiate it before publication. I asked him for the fullest list he could remember of the opportunities he had promoted — not simply the ones that survived, but also those that failed, closed, disappointed him or that he later stopped promoting.
To his credit, he came back with considerably more information.
Silvio listed Amway, Herbalife, 4Life, Empower Network, BBOM, Jeunesse, Forsage, Safir, Beurax, Ultima/PLCUX, LifeWave and now TAG Markets. He also provided approximate periods of involvement and, importantly, didn’t attempt to portray every experience as successful. He said he stopped promoting BBOM after six months because it failed to deliver what was promised and, in his words, “most of the things they said were complete lies.” He said Safir failed to achieve its goals, described Beurax as an “exit scam”, and said he stopped promoting Ultima/PLCUX when it didn’t deliver what had been promised.
I am deliberately not turning that list into a percentage score. Doing so would require me to decide which of those opportunities should be classified as legitimate, successful, unsuccessful or otherwise — and the fact that a company survived, paid commissions or continues operating does not by itself answer those questions. I certainly don’t want readers interpreting a percentage calculated by me as an endorsement of the remaining businesses.
More importantly, Silvio has now clarified what he meant by 99%.
After reading the finished article, he wrote that “when i talk 99% maybe is exaggeration” and explained that his assessment was based on the amount of time he spent promoting what he regarded as successful operations, rather than a calculation comparing the number of good opportunities against bad ones.
That clarification matters. The 99% was never a calculated success rate. It was Silvio’s personal impression of his career, and following my questions he has acknowledged that the figure may have been exaggerated. I think that is considerably more informative than trying to manufacture a mathematical score from his history.
Importantly, Silvio has authorised me to publish that expanded response in full. I think that’s only fair. I published the questions I put to him, so readers should also be able to read his complete answers rather than relying solely on the passages I have selected and quoted in this investigation. The document also shows how his answers developed after I gave him the opportunity to read the finished article before publication. You can read Silvio Fortunato’s complete 15-page Expanded Response here in his own words.
Now he has returned, and one of the financial opportunities he has chosen to put his name behind is TAG Markets.
That doesn’t make TAG Markets illegitimate because previous opportunities went wrong, and it doesn’t make Silvio responsible for everything a company he promotes might eventually do. But it does make his current standard of due diligence particularly relevant.
And after giving him another opportunity to answer my questions, one of the biggest unresolved issues finally became clearer: the identities of the Sonic traders aren’t simply unknown to me — Silvio says TAG Markets deliberately keeps them private from clients.
According to Silvio, TAG Markets knows who the traders are, knows their histories and has contracts with them, but does not disclose their identities because almost 500,000 followers could potentially pressure them when trades fail or question their strategies. Silvio’s position is that their Myfxbook and MetaTrader 5 records are more important than their names. As he put it: “People lie, numbers don’t.”
That is a much clearer answer than I had before.
It also leaves me with essentially the same due-diligence question: if the people actually making the trading decisions remain anonymous to the clients being asked to copy them, how independently can their claimed experience, professional history and qualifications be verified?
Decades Of Experience Should Mean Better Due Diligence
After everything I found, I don’t think the fairest way to describe Silvio Fortunato is as somebody blindly promoting anything that lands in front of him. His expanded response shows that he has thought about TAG Markets, tested the service himself, made withdrawals, reviewed trading data and considered the risks. He has also done something many promoters I investigate never do: he answered my questions, read the finished article before publication and then came back with even more information when I challenged parts of his response.
I give him credit for that.
Silvio has also been considerably more candid about his history. He now acknowledges that his original 99% claim may have been exaggerated, describes himself as having been “very naive” when he moved into financial opportunities, and openly identifies several promotions that he says didn’t work out as expected. Most significantly, he describes Beurax as an “exit scam” and says the experience contributed to him stepping away from promoting opportunities for approximately four years.
But that history is precisely why I expected his standard of due diligence today to be exceptionally high.
In his latest response, Silvio explained that before promoting TAG Markets, he and Paulo wanted to establish that the company was who it claimed to be, had a professional structure, was licensed and regulated, had a sustainable and legal compensation plan, and that they understood the Sonic trading strategy, amplification arrangements and insurance. He says Paulo had been a TAG Markets client since February and visited its Dubai headquarters twice, taking questions from both of them to the company. Silvio says they scrutinised TAG Markets until they reached “a level of trust” where they felt confident it was safe to promote to their list.
That gives me a much better understanding of what Silvio actually did before deciding to promote it.
It doesn’t resolve all of my questions.
We now know, according to Silvio, that the identities of the Sonic traders are deliberately withheld from clients. He believes their names aren’t important because their trading strategy, risk management, consistency, Myfxbook record and trades visible through MetaTrader 5 provide the information investors actually need. His phrase “People lie, numbers don’t” neatly summarises his position.
My standard is different. I would still want to independently establish who the traders are, verify their claimed professional histories and understand precisely who is responsible for managing the strategy. I would want independent confirmation of what the insurance covers. I would want to understand exactly how the 12X and 24X amplification arrangements work. And I would want the regulatory position established for the jurisdictions in which clients are actively being recruited, rather than assuming that a regulatory licence in one jurisdiction answers every question about another.
Silvio reaches a different conclusion from the evidence he has seen. He believes TAG Markets is legitimate, believes Sonic AI represents an acceptable trading risk and says money was not the reason he decided to promote it. He believes the opportunity can help people.
Perhaps the most revealing line in his original response remains one of the fairest:
“Am I wrong about Tag Markets? Maybe, (I don’t think I am) but is a risk i’m willing to take.”
And that is where I am leaving Silvio’s part of this investigation.
I haven’t concluded that TAG Markets is a scam simply because regulators have issued warnings, because promoters receive commissions, because some of Silvio’s previous opportunities ended badly, or because questions remain unanswered. That isn’t how I investigate. I follow the evidence until I understand how the operation actually works.
What I have established is that Sonic AI Gold is an affiliate-created funnel leading people into TAG Markets; its “AI” strategy is, according to Silvio himself, operated by human traders whose identities are deliberately kept private from clients; affiliates can benefit financially from introducing clients and building organisations; and there remain claims I consider important enough to independently verify.
Silvio says everyone joining his team must do their own due diligence.
I agree.
So that’s exactly what I’m doing.
Disclaimer: How This Investigation Was Conducted
This investigation relies entirely on OSINT — Open Source Intelligence — meaning every claim made here is based on publicly available records, archived web pages, corporate filings, domain data, social media activity, and open blockchain transactions. No private data, hacking, or unlawful access methods were used. OSINT is a powerful and ethical tool for exposing scams without violating privacy laws or overstepping legal boundaries.