ASHINGTON, May 5 — Charitable solicitations that include deliberate misrepresentations about what proportion of the money raised will go to the beneficiaries can be prosecuted as consumer fraud, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously today.

The decision, awaited anxiously by charities and state regulators, came in a long-running case that the Illinois attorney general brought against a telemarketer that raised $7 million ostensibly on behalf of a charity for Vietnam veterans while keeping $6 million for itself under the terms of its contract.

The Illinois Supreme Court had dismissed the attorney general's complaint on the ground that the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech prevented the government from deeming any particular level of fund-raising expenses to be unacceptable.

In overturning that dismissal, the court today agreed with the Illinois court that wrongdoing could not be inferred from high fund-raising costs alone.

"But the First Amendment does not shield fraud," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the court. "States may maintain fraud actions when fund-raisers make false or misleading representations designed to deceive donors about how their donations will be used."

In limiting its focus to "misleading affirmative representations," the court issued a rather narrow ruling that avoided the more difficult constitutional questions posed by solicitations that are merely suggestive without being flatly misleading.

By her careful approach, Justice Ginsburg managed to extract unanimity from a court that appeared far from unanimous when the case, Illinois v. Telemarketing Associations Inc., No. 01-1806, was argued two months ago.

The decision set a high burden that states must meet to prove fraud in charitable solicitations. A false statement, standing alone, does not amount to fraud, Justice Ginsburg said. Rather, the state must show that the solicitor deliberately made a false statement "with the intent to mislead the listener, and succeeded in doing so." As an "additional safeguard," she said, appellate courts may make their own independent review of the trial court's findings, as the Supreme Court has required in certain libel cases.

These safeguards were required by the First Amendment, Justice Ginsburg said. Then she added, "What the First Amendment and our case law emphatically do not require, however, is a blanket exemption from fraud liability for a fund-raiser who intentionally misleads in calls for donations."

By not addressing subtler forms of misleading come-ons and sales pitches, the decision was unlikely to allay fully the public concerns about aggressive fund-raising tactics. But it was likely to strengthen the hand of state regulators by making clear that three decisions the court issued in the 1980's to protect charities from intrusive regulation should not be understood by state courts as a bar against attacking outright fraud.

Those rulings invalidated state laws that prohibited charitable solicitations that did not return a certain percentage of receipts to the charities.

The Supreme Court's decision to hear the Illinois attorney general's appeal in this case alarmed the charitable sector by raising the prospect that the justices might revisit those precedents and treat certain percentages as presumptively unreasonable.

The attorney general had attacked the contract between a charity called VietNow and its fund-raiser, Telemarketing Associates Inc., which provided that 15 percent of receipts would go to the charity. In briefs to the Supreme Court, charities argued that expenses that sometimes seemed unreasonably high could be necessary to start a charity or build public awareness of an issue.

The decision today put the initial fears to rest. Pat Reed, a vice president of Independent Sector, a national coalition representing 22,000 charities, said the group was pleased with the decision because in limiting itself to "real fraud," the court had not retreated from its position that high costs alone could not be treated as fraud.

"Fraud hurts all of us," Ms. Reed said. "How you deal with cases of real fraud without infringing on the rights of charities and nonprofits to reach out to the public is a tough line to draw, and the court did an excellent job at getting us closer to it."

One state regulator, Assistant Attorney General William Josephson of New York, called the decision "a warning shot to the professional fund-raising industry that they can't simply assume a blanket exculpation under the First Amendment."

New York State has never considered any particular fund-raising percentage to indicate fraud, Mr. Josephson said, relying instead on disclosure to alert consumers how their charitable dollars are used.

The figures posted annually on the attorney general's Web site show that on average, 30 percent of the money raised for charity in New York actually goes to the charities.

The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, which describes itself as a national watchdog group, called the decision a "victory for accountability and truth in fund-raising."

Illinois filed its complaint against Telemarketing Associates in 1991 and will now be able to take its case to trial. The state's complaint included affidavits from one woman who said she was told that 90 percent of her contribution "goes to the vets" and from another who said she was told that none of her donation would be used for "labor expenses."

But the state's allegations of fraud remain to be proved. When the case was argued in March, the telemarketing company's lawyer, Eric Copilevitz, told the justices that under its contract, the company spent some of the money it retained on educational activities on the charity's behalf.

Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas filed a concurring opinion. They said that donors could be presumed to understand that expenses, even high ones, will be deducted from their contributions.

But this case concerned "a solid core of misrepresentations" that placed it in a different category, they said.