The cat and mouse game between international law enforcers and technology-savvy criminals perpetrating scams on the internet continues to rage around the world, with the latest figures showing the number of victims and the amount of money they lose is on the rise.

A report analysing internet crime in 2008, put out by a US-based alliance of experts including the FBI, finds that the number of complaints from victims of cyber crime rose by almost a third since 2007. The total number reached 275,284, amounting to $265m (£187m) in money lost.

The year's most popular scam involved goods being bought on the internet and simply not delivered. Other top ruses included the fleecing of individuals through fraudulent auctions on eBay and other auction websites, credit and debit card fraud and the ever-ubiquitous Nigerian confidence trick.

The report was compiled the Internet Crime Complaint Centre, a partnership of the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Centre. It helps law agencies keep up with the ever-morphing world of cyber crime, where new scams arise and transform at lightning speed.

The US is both home to, and victim of, the lion's share of fraud.

Two out of every three of the recorded perpetrators of the crimes came from America and 93% of complainants.

They tended to come from the west and east coasts, as well as Texas and Florida, where internet sophistication is proportionately concentrated.

Internationally, the UK came second in the league table of perpetrators, with 10% registered there. The relative prevalence of the UK might be also a reflection of the high concentration of tech-savvy people there, though several scams also use London as a half-way house from which to contact and meet their victims.

According to the statistics compiled in the report, men prove to be the most gullible - with 55% of the victims being male, and nearly half aged 30 to 50. Men also tended to lose more money to scam-artists than women in a ratio of $1.69 lost per male to every $1 lost per female - though that may be more a reflection of the relative cost of the goods men buy on the web.

The median figure for the amount of money lost by each victim was almost $1,000, underlining the pain that falling for such tricks can cause.

Overall, law enforcers will be disappointed that the gradual decline in complaints that had been seen in the past two years, down to 206,884, has now been reversed. But experts insist they remain by a raft of new tricks, including an audacious scam which involved putting out fraudulent emails under the name of the FBI itself.

The famous Nigerian scam has also been fine-tuned, with the criminals now hacking into an individual's email account and then using it to make unauthorised appeals for financial information to victims.

Leslie Hoppey, an FBI cyber crime expert, said this sort of fraud would always be around. "But people can protect themselves through basic guidelines: don't respond to unsolicited emails, be sceptical of individuals representing themselves as officials, and don't click on links."