[Skans]

If the business simply closed its doors, did not file for bankruptcy and kept your money without transferring the item, you could sue the company and/or the owner for fraud etc.

However, when most businesses go under, the business and often its principal usually declare bankruptcy. In that case, I would assume that the Trustee in Bankruptcy would be given authority to liquidate the NFA items; if their are no enforceable liens on the NFA items, i.e. they were owned outright by the NFA dealer, I would expect that the trustee could liquidate the product and the buyers who paid money to the NFA dealer would be SOL, or would have to work it out with the Trustee. The bankruptcy trustee would still have to use an NFA dealer to liquidate the machine guns. I would think it would be treated the same way as folks who pay for things on lay-away and the department store goes bankrupt. I believe in lay-away cases, the customer ends up bearing the risk and losing his money.