fall victim

Verb

fall victim (third-person singular simple present falls victim, present participle falling victim, simple past fell victim, past participle fallen victim)

1. (idiomatic, intransitive) To suffer as a result of external circumstances or someone else's actions.
   • Obviously, birds are very vulnerable to human persecution at such passage sites, where hecatombs of raptors fall victim every year to human greed or pleasure. Examples of important areas for seasonal mass migration and / or resting of[…]1961, The Horace M. Albright Conservation Lectureship
   • F. Platten led a group of several score Swiss workers with their families (many of them subsequently also fell victim to repression) who had organized an agricultural co-operative not far from Simbirsk, Lenin's birthplace, back in 1923.1989, The Stalin Phenomenon, Stosius Incorporated/Advent Books Division

   Synonyms:

   fall prey