Coinbase bought a company founded by disgraced cybermercenaries from Hacking Team, and now Coinbase users are trying unsuccessfully to delete their accounts

Hacking Team (previously) was an Italian cybermercenary company that sold surveillance tools to the world's most vicious autocrats and dictators, only to collapse when all of its internal documents were hacked and dumped online by an unknown person who claimed to be motivated by a desire to expose their complicity in human rights abuses including torture and murder.

The Hacking Team mercenaries keep turning up anew in rebranded startups, but anyone who was involved with Hacking Team should be permanently disqualified from any role involving information security, the same way that ex-KGB officers should be permanently disqualified from roles in politics or policing (yeah, I know).

The latest group of Hacking Team war criminals to find themselves reaccepted into polite society is the staff of Neutrino, a startup acquired by the cryptocurrency company Coinbase, to do forensic tracking of blockchain transactions.

Many Coinbase users have concluded that they do not want to entrust their finances to a company that includes these unsavory characters, and so was born the #DeleteCoinbase movement to coordinate divestiture from the company.

However, Coinbase will only allow you to delete your account if it has a zero balance, free of "dust" (infinitesimal residues left behind from fractional cryptocurrency transactions) and users are finding it impossible to rid themselves of their dust, which Coinbase insists is merely an accident and nothing to do with not wanting disgruntled users to leave.

Self-described Bitcoin maximalist Jeremy Seaside participated in the #DeleteCoinbaseTrustChain, cleared all of his Coinbase accounts out, but still couldnt close his accounts, he told me in a Twitter direct message.