Workers furious at loss of $1.76m

An underground bank in Israel is reportedly refusing to return $1.76 million to Chinese workers after it failed to transfer the money back to their families, Beijing News said yesterday.

The black-market bank is one of several in Israel that has been used by expatriate Chinese to channel money back to China. The banks became popular among Chinese workers in Israel in the 1990s because the workers, many of them in the country illegally, had no other means of sending money back to their families.

Today, legal workers have alternatives but many still use the banks.