The activity of private investigations by fraud examiners is a business of lawyers, auditors, and other professionals who investigate suspicions of financial crime by white‐collar criminals. This paper presents results from an empirical study of investigation reports. The available sample consists of 28 reports written mostly by auditing firms such as Deloitte, Ernst & Young, and PwC. The blame game can occur at two stages in a private investigation. First, the mandate formulated by a client may point investigators in a specific direction. Next, investigators sometimes suffer from a tunnel view of predetermined opinions. In the sample of 28 investigations reports, more than half of them involve potential blame game victims. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.