This paper examines referential strategies around the word “victim” in seven French- and English-Canadian newspapers when the financial crisis occurred in 2007 and 2008. The lemma “victim*” was searched using a concordancer in a corpus of 4.2 million words in order to see who was victim of what in the economics and finance sections of the mainstream press. A bilingual contrastive analysis shows a convergence when the word “victim” occurs in the context of the financial crisis, since, both in French and in English, it is used to refer to business corporations rather than human beings. Although this finding was expected, the analysis led to the discovery that the crisis is anthropomorphized (that is, it claims victims), which contributes to hiding the agency of market participants, such as investment banks.