A gangland armourer who advertised machine guns to some of Britain's most terrifying criminals and plotted to 'melt the face' of a rival with acid has been jailed for 26 years and eight months.Philip Waugh, 40, from Warrington, Cheshire, armed organised crime groups across the UK with military grade weapons which he would flog on the now-defunct encrypted messaging platform Encrochat.Using the handle 'AceProspect' on the network, Waugh offered AK47 assault rifles, a Cold War-style Skorpion machine gun, an Uzi machine gun and a host of lethal pistols to Britian's crime bosses.The 40-year-old also offered hundreds of rounds of ammunition for the groups to load their machinery with.Authorities first became aware of the plot Waugh had been orchestrating in 2020, but had initially struggled to crack his identity beyond his alias on the chat site.A series of texts discovered by the National Crime Agency (NCA) found that a British man - who they would later unmask as Waugh - was advertising automatic and semi-automatic weapons which would typically be used on the frontlines of a war.Among those EncroChat messages, which the Daily Mail have produced mock-ups of, showed Waugh plotting his associate, Jonathan Gordon, 37, to blind a Warrington man named Nathan Simpson with acid.Gordon, a hitman member of Liverpool's Deli Mob, replied to say that he would ensure Mr Simpson gets 'the full face wash' in an apparent return for £10,000. Philip Waugh (above) has been jailed for 26 years after arming organised crime groups in Britain with military-grade rifles and plotting to 'melt the face' of a rival with acid