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"Miracle Cures and Murder For Hire: How A Spoon-Bending Turkish Magician Built A $600 Million Nasdaq-Listed Scam Based On A Lifetime Of Lies

Summary: Enochian Biosciences, Inc. (NASDAQ:ENOB)
Last week, Enochian Biosciences’ co-founder, “scientific founder”, “inventor”, and largest shareholder, Serhat Gumrukcu, was arrested by Federal authorities over allegations that he conspired in a plot to murder a Vermont father of six.
The victim, Gregory Davis, was murdered on January 6th, 2018, just 19 days before Gumrukcu was scheduled to appear in court to defend himself against felony fraud allegations related to a 2016 deal with Davis. Federal prosecutors argued that the prospective merger deal that eventually resulted in Enochian going public served as a key motive for the murder.
Enochian is a biotech company with an entirely preclinical pipeline of claimed miracle cures, vaccines and treatments for HIV, Influenza, Hepatitis, Cancer, and COVID-19. The company claimed last week that Gumrukcu “has had no formal role in the Company” and that the incident was "completely unrelated to the Company”.
However, Enochian’s own disclosures indicate that the company and its pipeline are completely dependent on Gumrukcu. Every product Enochian is investigating appears to have been licensed to it by Gumrukcu-controlled or affiliated entities or are otherwise based on his research.
Unbeknownst to investors (but known to Enochian’s senior leadership) Gumrukcu’s latest arrest for a murder conspiracy is simply the most recent in a string of alleged crimes by Gumrukcu.
Gumrukcu also currently faces criminal charges in his native Turkey where, in August 2012, he was arrested based on accusations of falsely posing as a doctor and charging a desperate family $275,000 to treat a terminally ill cancer patient, who subsequently died, with substances that a real oncologist would later describe as “useless.”
Gumrukcu then fled Turkey despite an outstanding arrest warrant. Three years later, in August 2015, he sold similar ‘miracle’ concoctions to the desperate parents of a young Pennsylvania boy who had terminal cancer. When the boy died after an initial $59,100 treatment, Gumrukcu refused to return the family’s advanced payment of $253,000, resulting in litigation.
In February 2017, Gumrukcu was arrested by authorities after the State of California accused him of a slew of white-collar crimes, including fraud, identity theft, and check kiting – a total of 14 felonies.
The company hired Gumrukcu as a consultant in April 2017, just 2 months after his arrest for the alleged crime spree.
Despite the ongoing criminal proceedings, Enochian still moved forward with acquiring and taking public a Gumrukcu-affiliated entity in January 2018, describing Gumrukcu as the “sole inventor” of all of the acquired company’s technology. The deal gave Gumrukcu and his related entities & individuals 50% of the combined company.
As he awaited sentencing following a pleading guilty to one felony, Gumrukcu attended the Nasdaq bell ringing ceremony for Enochian, likely with permission from his probation officer. He was praised as Enochian’s “scientific founder” at the ceremony.
Authorities in California told us that in January 2018, Gumrukcu’s felony plea charge had been reduced to a misdemeanor after he paid over $1 million in restitution to victims.
Our research indicates that Enochian executives knew about Gumrukcu’s criminal history. Mark Dybul, CEO of Enochian, wrote a glowing letter of recommendation to a Turkish criminal court on behalf of Gumrukcu.
Invoking his close friendship and mentee relationship with Dr. Anthony Fauci and his relationship with Bill Gates, Dybul called Gumrukcu a “rare genius” who had come up with platforms to cure HIV, hepatitis B, all strains of influenza, Zika, dengue fever, and COVID. Dybul also wrote that the now-accused murderer was “deeply compassionate, empathetic, and approachable”, providing his “strongest recommendation”.
In a phone interview, Chairman Rene Sindlev admitted to us “I knew that he had been charged for 14 (felony) counts” but moved forward with the deal and expanded the relationship anyway.
In the years since, Enochian has awarded lucrative cash consulting and licensing contracts to entities controlled by Gumrukcu and his husband. Enochian executives have repeatedly failed to disclose Gumrukcu’s criminal activity to shareholders.
Enochian’s former CFO is currently embroiled in an undisclosed lawsuit with Enochian’s leadership, claiming he was fired for asking “critical questions” about “serious financial improprieties” and large payments to Gumrukcu, and for questioning the company’s close association with an individual accused of numerous felonies.
Gumrukcu has continued to sell unlicensed and unvetted “miracle” treatments to desperate parents of terminally ill children, bilking them of hundreds of thousands of dollars. His private practice’s office is located in the same building as Enochian’s headquarters, and its business is deeply intertwined with Enochian, despite the company’s claims to the contrary.
We have been unable to find any jurisdiction in which Gumrukcu is licensed as a medical doctor. He is unlicensed in California, where he has apparently been practicing medicine anyway, and where he has claimed to have made his major breakthroughs for Enochian.
Gumrukcu claims to have spent 12+ years earning an M.D. and multiple PhDs in Russia and Turkey. Our research indicates he made it all up. He has no medical degree and no PhDs.
His name does not appear in the official Russian national degree database. The school he claimed to graduate from in Russia sent us a formal letter showing that he never even enrolled. We also checked with Russian border control and police who had no record of Gumrukcu ever having a Russian student visa or even a short-term tourist visa, let alone spending years studying medicine.
Instead, Gumrukcu looks to have purchased a fake Russian medical degree on the black market, a common problem in Russia, as reported by media.
As part of our research, we purchased a similar black market Russian medical degree from the same school, with the same claimed major, the same date, and the same “official” stamp as Gumrukcu’s. The process was surprisingly easy—the hardest part was smuggling it out of Russia through a neighboring country to the U.S., given new wartime export restrictions.
We also checked with the Turkish university Gumrukcu claimed to have received a PhD. They had no record of him. Meanwhile, the Turkish medical school where he began undergraduate studies confirmed he had attended, but later dropped out before graduating.
Turkish criminal records show that Gumrukcu admitted to police that his highest level of education was a high school degree, despite the arrest taking place after the period where Gumrukcu claimed to have already been a doctor.
We learned of Gumrukcu's actual past by scouring old magic shops and second-hand bookstores in Turkey, finding that he was a local magician. With his stage name “Dr. No”, he studied and taught spoon-bending, firewalking, and performing as a mentalist, claiming magical healing powers and garnering praise from the likes of fellow hucksters like Uri Geller.
Gumrukcu’s magic mentor shared grainy DVD recordings of Gumrukcu’s local performances that he found in a dusty cardboard box in the backroom of a magic shop. The performances took place in Turkey during time periods when Gumrukcu would later claim to be in Russia studying medicine.
Based on our investigation, we strongly believe that Gumrukcu’s education credentials are entirely fabricated. Consequently, we believe Enochian’s claimed scientific breakthroughs have been developed by a fake doctor with a long criminal rap sheet who now stands accused of murder.
Despite the company’s claims that top scientists are still behind the research, many are already backing away. An international cancer doctor that Gumrukcu claimed was his mentor told us a picture of him on the website for Gumrukcu’s research entity, the Seraph Research Institute, is a fake: “I never wore a Seraph coat. It´s a forgery.” “I never wore (a) Seraph coat as shown in the picture, so how could I validate his science?”
A world-renowned microbiologist who briefly served on Enochian’s Scientific Advisory Board and was previously quoted by Enochian as saying he was “blown away” by Gumrukcu’s “brilliant creativity” told us: “I agree retrospectively I should have done some due-diligence”. On the validity of the science, he wrote: “I have never validated anything, and they should not use my name.”
A former senior executive told us: “I left because I lost scientific trust in what [Gumrukcu] was promoting…I had a few facts that corroborated that he lied to me and when scientists start to lie a little bit and massage the data, then I am afraid to have another Elizabeth Holmes story.”
Gumrukcu has siphoned an estimated ~$20 million in cash from Enochian shareholders through a series of license agreements, consulting contracts, and other related-party transactions. Gumrukcu and his spouse own the largest single stake in Enochian, about 32% of the company, worth ~$90 million as of this writing. We expect he will sell shares to fund his legal expenses.
We think Gumrukcu is a lifelong con artist, who has catapulted himself from being a small-town Turkish magician to leading a publicly-traded, Nasdaq-listed medical research enterprise and fooling many along the way.
With its founder and main source of scientific discoveries jailed on murder-for-hire allegations, this cash-burning company without peer-reviewed research and no genuine clinical prospects is now a “catch me if you can” story that we believe has finally reached the end-phase."

Full report here:

https://hindenburgresearch.com/enochian/