Just a few more things from my point of view and what I know about Venom.
1. The delay in responses isn't abnormal for him. Like I mentioned, he works long hours when the weather is nice. It's not strange to have someone who gets busy with life stay away from LRG and eBay because of other stuff going on in life.
I myself have been working really long hours lately and have been away from this board and eBay for days at a time. If I didn't own the board, I probably would have been gone for weeks at a time.
2. He has always done the bulk of his buying/selling (mostly buying) here on the board. His eBay account only got started in 2010. Before that, I don't know if he has ever bought from eBay before. He has been buying stuff here for 9 years though, and he has had a stellar reputation. Not everyone uses eBay. For many reasons.
3. Not everyone takes good pictures. As shown with Saleen's pic, if the lighting and angle is not good, then the marbling isn't apparent at all. That one pic Saleen took showed the marbling great on the bottom one and barely at all on the top one.
4. If I had some auctions worth a ton of money on eBay and I had a bunch of people claiming that they were "100% sure they were fake", I would definitely pull them, because the naysayers would only end up running off potential bidders and costing me money.
5. He bought something from imountainteacher. Unfortunately we can't pull up that auction to see if it was the repro weapons or one of the other repro items (like sleds or shields).
6. GJNL is 100% right to be skeptical for all the reasons he listed.My only complaint was to give the guy (Venom) a chance to reply since his long solid reputation affords him that courtesy.
Other than that, I would like to see Venom post here answering all the concerns raised, and then relist his stuff with better pics and hopefully get top dollar for his stuff.