Fewer Americans fell for Internet fraudsters last year but those who did parted with a record 239.09 million dollars (152.5 million euros), an annual report by the FBI said Thursday.

Just under 207,000 complaints of online fraud were reported to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) in 2007, down from 207,492 complaints the previous year and more than 231,000 in 2005, the report said.

But the total dollar loss to the fraudsters was 239.09 million dollars in 2007, up from 198.44 million in 2006, the report said.

"We're seeing more schemes involving bigger ticket items, get-rich-quick and work-at-home schemes that involve higher dollar losses," FBI special agent John Hambrick, who is in charge of the IC3 unit, told AFP.

"But I'm optimistic that people are starting to catch on to some of these scams and we will continue to try to educate them to the dangers of Internet fraud," he said, commenting on the decrease in the number of victims of online crime.

The preferred method of ensnaring a victim online was through spam email, the source of 75 percent of Internet scams, the report said.

"A cyber criminal is only looking for a less than one percent return on all the emails he sends out, and he can still make money hand over fist," said Hambrick.