Bad Magic | The Lawsuit | S4-E6

Things were not going well for Serhat Kumruktu in the summer of 2023.

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From Wondery, I'm Laura Beale and this is a special episode of Dr. Death Bad Magic.

Yeah, the lawsuit was filed by Serhat's husband and an entity that he has a stake in that owns a lot of shares of what once was called Enochian Biosciences. So it's a lawsuit where they are accusing the company of fraud, accusing the company of failing to disclose key information to investors. And demanding that Rene Sinlev, the chairman, Mark Dybel, the CEO, and other insiders give money back to the company that the lawsuit alleges was unjustly stolen. Essentially, this, basically, to me, reads like a spite lawsuit in my view. It's 108 pages of Serhat, through his husband saying You sued me last year, calling me a brazen fraud.

It's just I looked at it and there's just such irony. I mean, he's accusing the other side of fraud. When I first heard about this, I was like, It's what?

I mean, what was your reaction?

What was your reaction?

I think Serhat is sitting in prison, waiting for his trial for wire fraud now and the murder conspiracy. And I think he's probably pretty pissed that the company sued him and essentially tried to blame everything on him. So I think he's just trying to say no. You guys are also scumbags and a lot of this is your fault, and you were there and you were involved. And here's a bunch of evidence showing how you guys were enriching yourselves at the expense of shareholders. And sort of harnessing lies and his own claims to make money for themselves.

Do you think the company itself is endangered by this suit?

I think the company is endangered by the prospect that the major merger announcement is, in all likelihood, completely worthless. That they have virtually nothing left, so I think the company is in danger. The lawsuit, I think, helps bring that closer to fruition, but I think that's likely an inevitability at this point.

So if they still own a big share of the stock, why would they do something that would hurt the company? Because if the stock goes up, then presumably they make money? So I'm confused by this. Can you explain it to me?

Yeah, I think. Part of it is an allegation that the insiders were buying shares at a massive discount ahead of major news that they knew was going to send the stock up. So there's one example where Rene Sinlev, the chairman of the company, bought stock just days before the company announced a major merger transaction with an AI company. And that transaction announcement sent the stock up over 1000 over the course of months from its low prices. So, with the chairman buying shares immediately prior to the transaction, with clear knowledge that was going to be announced. The allegation is that he basically enriched himself at the company's expense, using this material, non-public information that he had. That's a pretty serious allegation.

But wouldn't? Serhat and his husband have also made money off the stock. Like, if the whole company implodes, then nobody wins, right?

That's right, yeah. So I do think, to an extent, this is probably cutting his nose off to spite his face.

So you mentioned Mark Dibal, and his name comes up over and over again in the suit. We covered this some in the podcast. But at first he's a big defender of Serhat, and then it ends up they're suing each other. Can you kind of walk me through, just briefly, the arc of their relationship? yeah.

So at first, Mark Dibal and the company for that matter. Had just lavished praise on Serhat. That he was going to revolutionize medicine, that he was the Michelangelo of biotech and things of that sort. So for years had just been lavishing this praise on him. But then, when everything came crumbling down, I think they chose to try and pin the blame on Serhat. Serhat is in jail and I think the lawsuit that they filed this was in October 2022. Seemed like an effort to allege that Serhat was the brazen fraud, that he had faked all the data, that he was responsible for all these terrible things that had happened.

It doesn't seem unreasonable knowing what we know now.

No, I think it's probably the case. I think Serhat is indeed a brazen fraud. But that doesn't mean Mark Dibal and Rene Sinlev aren't in a lot of white-collar cases. The defense for everyone else who's not the key individual is almost always the play-dumb defense. We didn't know the data was all fake.

So it centers around the acquisition of this company. Can you just briefly walk me through how they acquired that company and what the lawsuit is saying about the problems in the acquisition of the company?

Oh my gosh, yeah, all right, let me give it a shot at least, thanks.

And I know you're not an attorney, but you spend a lot of time looking up dirt on companies. I'd like your kind of general impression about whether this seems like a strong case or not.

As much as I feel weird agreeing with Serhat on something, I think the evidence here seems quite strong and well documented. I think there's quite a bit here.

So are you going to keep on? I'm curious, are you done? are you going to keep on popping popcorn and following this, or are you just an observer now?

No, we're going to follow the story. I want to see what happens with Serhat's trial. He is a pretty talented magician and illusionist. Can he fool a jury? I'm curious to see what happens with Mark Dibal and Renee Sinla, two individuals that, despite everything, have come out thus far relatively unscathed and have just slapped a new name on what they're doing. And tried to do it all over again, in not much more convincing fashion than the last time they tried this.

I think that's a good place to end. Thanks Nate, it was nice to talk to you.

You too, I appreciate it, thank you.

All right, thanks a lot.

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Scammers are best known for living the high life until they're forced to trade it all in for handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit once they're finally caught. I'm Sachi Cole and I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the host of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns of some of the most infamous scams of all time. The impact on victims and what's left once the facade falls away? We've covered stories like a Shark tank certified entrepreneur who left the show with an investment but soon faced mounting bills. An active lawsuit filed by Larry King. And no real product to push.

After Hindenburg Research exposed that Enokian's scientific founder had faked all of his credentials, the company stood by the science. But in 2022, they dialed that back. Five months after Serhat's arrest, they admitted that he had actually faked some of the scientific data in his papers. Elizabeth Bick is a scientific fraud researcher, and she was one of the earliest people to notice the inconsistencies in Serhat's research. She's here to talk about how those papers got published in the first place and how scientific fraud can slip under the radar.

Oh, yeah, it's a tough question to answer because some of the things I'm finding. You wish that a peer reviewer would have seen that, because sometimes it's so obvious, the photoshopping is so obvious that somebody should have caught that. But the truth is that peer reviewers are. Well, it's a volunteer job.

Yeah, and speaking about the larger scientific community, I don't want anyone hearing this to think that this is rampant, that most of the scientific research out there is fake or fraud. So can you give me some context in terms of the percentage of papers that you review that actually do have problems?

So I did a scan of 20,000 papers and I found that around 2 of those papers had really big problems. That were not the result of an honest error, but were the result of an intention to mislead, and so that's 2, and those were obvious problems by looking at the paper. So the real percentage of fraud has to be a bit higher, but I would estimate it maybe in the 5 range.

So what's the answer, then? To keeping the fraudsters out of science? Do we need more scientists-turned-detectives like you, or is there some better system? I'm intrigued by your idea of having a whole fraud department at a journal, but again, I don't know if that's feasible. But if you had a magic wand, how would you fix this?

We would hope to have more consequences for people who are caught doing fraud. But the problem is now. We also have these professional scammers, which we call paper mills, which are networks of people making money selling completely fake papers to authors who need to publish a paper. And you can find these advertisements very openly, for example, on Facebook groups, and there's whole networks of people where they advertise. Do you need an authorship on a paper and give us some money and we'll give you a paper? And there's hundreds and hundreds of advertisements, probably even thousands.

And how much does it cost? If I'm desperate and I've got to publish a paper, how much do I have to shell out for a fake scientific paper?

Well, do you want to be a first author, second author, or third author? because you know first authors? ...?

So there are tiers of fake papers.

There are tiers. Yes, I've seen $5,000, I've also seen $500. I guess it depends on the quality of the paper, but a couple of hundred to a couple of thousand dollars, yes.

But even then, this paper has to get past peer review.

Yeah, but it gets.

Wow, so I want to move to the particular situation that we talked about in this particular season of Dr. Death. I don't think Serhat, like, went out and bought a paper, but if you could, I would like to talk about the fraud and the retraction of papers. In this particular instance. This was not the first that you'd heard about Enochian and Serhat.

I think I was contacted by a journalist asking me if I heard the story about the founder. And they asked me if I had heard about it and if I could look into their papers. And so there's two posters by Enochian Biosciences, scientific posters presented at two different conferences. And these posters are sort of like science posters at a high school science fair, and they're about two different topics.

Yeah, you'd think that would be something he wouldn't forget. Do you have any thoughts about the actual cure strategies that he talks about?

And so there's another problem in some of the papers in which he describes this therapy. To treat patients who have some viral infection with another virus. And I think it's to distract the immune system. So in this paper, they described this technique, and he described two different patients who were magically cured with this super infection strategy. So one is a COVID-19 patient who was treated with this super infection six days after their COVID-19 symptom started. And then he got better.

But I don't know.

I've had Covid twice, actually, and most of the times you recover, if you're generally healthy, you will recover within a week. So he started on day six and he got better. well, he could have used chocolate pudding and he would have gotten better.

Yes, well, based on what you saw. Do you think he just made some mistakes and the science is real, or do you think the whole thing is just made up?

I'm not sure if the science of Enochian biosciences is real or not, based on what I see of lack of disclosure, of conflict of interest. A reused image of a mouse, some other posters that appear to have reused images that have passed on for different experiments. I'm very skeptical, but I think a lot of people want to believe in some magic cure for all kinds of diseases.

Why do you think that is?

If you have a patient who has some severe disease, maybe cancer or severe infection, they will try whatever is offered to them in the hopes it will cure them. And we all would be if we were in that situation. You just grab any chance that people offer to you. Because as humans, we want to believe in these success stories. And that is the reason why a lot of people who are perhaps charming, who have the right attitude to convince other people, they can pull that off.

Yeah, that's kind of a universal quality to the doctors that we've covered in this series, and even other doctors I've written about. Who take advantage of people. And they seem to have a lot of bedside manner and charm. And sadly, in so many cases, the patients are facing death or serious health consequences. And then these men step in with promises to save them.

And it's also such an easy choice in a way to do experiments on people who are going to die anyways. Because if the treatment didn't work, they're not going to complain, right?

Well, I just want to thank you for the work that you do to try to hold to account people who take advantage of the system. And I also want to thank you for spending time talking with us.

Yeah, you're very welcome. It was my pleasure to be here and to be talking about this topic.

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