Before I get started, I want to put in the first line of this review thing: Scam or legit? Unsure, not enough evidence to rule it either way.
So, from browsing, this is a site that a fair number of people are interested in, but it also has a lot of people shouting "scam!" at it. My experience probably isn't going to dissuade people from that viewpoint. So this may turn out to be rather long, as I'll try to include as much info as I can whilst keeping both sides anonymous.
Background
My contact with this group started a few months ago. Coming home one night (not even that late, only about 8 PM) I was subjected to a pretty brutal sexual assault. It left me a nervous wreck for months and on bonfire night was even checked into a psych ward under section 2. I came out the following week, but when I returned to work my employer dropped a bit of a bombshell on me -- night shift.
In modern days, where the zero hours contract is king, I didn't have a whole lot of choices: Accept it, leave, or tell them why that shift scares the crap out of me. Good luck walking out of job in today's economic climate, new jobs are hard to come by, especially for someone in her mid 20s with very little to pad out a CV with. Telling them about my incident was also a little awkward. After all, I haven't reported it to the police, so why am I only know telling people about it?
So my only real choice was to accept being transferred to the night shift, and be able to defend myself in case of the worst case scenario. Having fired some semi-auto pistols in the past when staying with extended family in the United States, I felt "comfortable enough" with the thought of owning a firearm, despite knowing that the busybody thought police wouldn't approve. At the end of the day, my attackers were a certain denomination of "Asian" that has over the last 15 years, been raping underage girls in the towns and cities of Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford, Derby, Bristol and Telford with almost near impunity, practically carte blanche from the authorities.
As I saw it, if they weren't going to play by the rules, why should I? If it took the police that long to get justice for underage girls, at my age, I've got no faith in them ever protecting me, now or in the future. The only person who can protect me, is me, by whatever means. So that's where I turned to the dark net, and after a bit of searching, found the armory...
Contact and transaction
The armory wasn't my first port of call. I'd found several others with the most basic of searches: Euro Guns and UK Guns and Ammo. Both of which have since turned out to be scams. I couldn't seem to make any sort of contact with the latter, and the former didn't appear to know too much about what was they were selling. It had me a little nervous to say the least. So I looked around elsewhere.
Since finding the armory, one thing I can't really fault them on so far is contact. It did take them 5 days to get back to me on one occasion, but at all other times they've been pretty good in the regard. And after some length discussions I think we eventually agreed on a firearm that would be right for my circumstances.
Now it's time to move into the territory of payment (via escrow) but here's where things turn south. Being unfamiliar with dark net escrow, I let them suggest an escrow site which they trust. Yes, I'm aware that last sentence will have DNM veterans screaming "How retarded can you get?!". When your contact with them has thus far seemed trustworthy, it's easy to fall into that trap.
The site they gave was multisig.pw ... Yes it operates in the clearnet, registered by verifiable identities, but there also comes the aspect that if something goes wrong, are you really going to give them the full details of your transaction? Well I went ahead with it anyway, despite knowing that if anything went wrong, I'd very little to stand on.
Upon sending the bitcoins to their temporary receiving address, I had a major hardware fault that brought the whole computer down abruptly for several hours, and several days to rebuild my blockchain (since I use bitcoin core). By the time I'd got everything back on line, multisig wants five confirmations? They've got six ... hundred... The transaction has definitely happened, so now time for the moment of truth, have they nicked the coins or is it legit?
I'm guessing no one in the world is going to be surprised at what comes next... Yes, multisig is still sat there saying "please pay..." and it's changed the receiving address on me. So I've emailed multisig's support, but unlike the armory, they don't respond at all. Not even so much as a "thanks for your enquiry, we'll investigate further".
Outcome
To this point, I'm still in contact with the armory, they haven't cut and run, but based on my experience with multisig, I couldn't recommend them until they get that sorted. The worst part of my experience is where the armory's website states the following on their front page "During this time your funds are held in an escrow service, which is a third party that both vendor (us) and buyer (you) trust to hold the funds until the order arrives and you can verify it is correct." So they trust multisig, who have turned out to be garbage in my case. By association, my crap experience with multisig (who on this basis, I'd never trust again), this lowers my confidence in the armory.
However I have had to lower my GPG trust on their key. Whilst GPG key trust isn't intended as an indication of whether their service is legit or a scam, or more or less doubles up as such. Put simply they've introduced me to a third party who I now personally don't trust, so I feel I've got no choice but to lower my trust in the armory's ability to introduce me to third parties, since that's what the GPG trust value is a measure of. Note that I say lowered the trust in the key, rather than marking the key as untrustworthy.
Verdict
So, to repeat what I said at the start. From my experience, is the armory a scam? I've got no evidence of that. Is the armory legit? Unfortunately, I've got no evidence of that either. All I have is my own experience, which leans more towards the negative than the positive. From my perspective most of that negative has been largely "inherited" from a negative experience with multisig, whose contact is non-existent.
At the time of making the payment, I hadn't seen any issues with multisig, but since then I've now seen another reddit poster post lose bitcoins with multisig in a nearly identical way (link ). And it happened 3 months ago so only got myself to blame for not searching hard enough. You make mistakes and you learn from them.
My advice to anyone wouldn't be to say absolutely don't trust the armory, I haven't got enough evidence or experience to say that, but I would say, don't use multisig.
Personal opinion
More than anything, I'm disappointed with the outcome especially since gut instinct tells me that they were honest. But maybe that's just pure optimism on my part? After all, I did try and send a substantial amount of money to them via bitcoins. I don't think screaming scam will solve anything, so that's the basis behind my rather longwinded write up. Read it all and make up your own minds. But in my mind, multisig is what soured it for me.
Edited
Post edited since it stripped out all the whitespace I'd put in (to make it easier to read), so I've added some sub-headings to try and make it a little easier to follow
Updated
Since the comments have turned into a debate of legality and morality, later on I'll find a more appropriate subreddit to discuss that. Surely DarkNetMarkets is about which vendors are trustworthy, and which are not. Of those those that are, how high of a quality are their products? etc. Not what's what legal and what's not. Pretty much all of the vendors discussed on this subreddit are vending illegally - they wouldn't be operating on the dark net if their activities were legal. And most of us are acting illegally by using these markets.
"I'm just buying a bit of weed" isn't really an acceptable cop out either. You may be OK, but far more innocent people have suffered from knock-on effects from drug related crime than firearms crime. Thefts from homes or violent muggings just to pay for the habit. No one crime is any more acceptable than another. Like I say, I'll discuss this elsewhere later, but not here...
First off, I'm really sorry about your situation. I happen to have spent a good chunk of time in psych wards throughout my life. I hope it was of some help. To be completely honest I'm not experienced with The Armory directly. I've browsed the store several times, and have passively kept up with all the drama about it. I believe it was actually legit for a while, but the overall consensus now is that they are at worst scammers (and at best incredibly incompetent of running their business). Many people shared similar experience where they are being ignored by the escrow site. It's not unthinkable that their "trusted" escrow service is actually run by them.
In any case, in situations like this (dark-net sales outside of an established market), it would be wise to only use a well-known, legitimate escrow service, or better yet move to a trustworthy centralized market. I know this info doesn't exactly help right now or solve anything... but maybe it'll be useful just for future reference. As for your order, well, I hope I'm wrong and you didn't get scammed. Unfortunately there are far more threads here by people who paid for their order and never heard back than there are reports of successful transactions (which I could only find one of here on reddit), so cross your fingers. On a side note: Are you sure you can't get a firearm legally where you live?