HE thought he had discovered the perfect strategy to win an online game. But it backfired when it caused his Facebook account to be suspended instead.

Mr Syed Muzaffar Hussain, 24, an undergraduate at the Singapore Institute of Management, said he got hooked on the Facebook-based Fluff Friends application when he came down with chicken pox in January.

The game allows users on the social networking site to keep a virtual pet.

To optimise their pets' speed, users have to feed their pets virtual food and 'pet' them by clicking on a button.

Mr Syed said he spent up to seven hours a day on the application while he was recovering from chicken pox for two weeks.

He said: 'My friends were really into it, and I had nothing much to do at home, so I started playing a lot with the application.' After he recovered, he still spent up to four hours each day on the application.

He got so hooked on it that he was even determined to maximise the number of races his 'pet' could participate in every hour. Users can race their pets up to 20 times in an hour.

Mr Syed said the application is time-consuming because avid players have to spend a lot of time 'petting' their pets to improve their moods.

He said: 'You have to click on the button, then wait for the page to reload. It takes ages.' But he discovered a short-cut by chance which allowed him to pet his pet quickly, and with minimal effort.

He said: 'I accidentally dropped my stapler on my computer keyboard. It landed on the 'enter' key, and the page kept reloading.'

So for a few weeks, Mr Syed put a weight on his keyboard every night whenever he was away from the computer to 'pet' his pet.

'When I woke up in the morning, the pet's mood would be maximised, and I didn't even have to lift a finger,' he said.

For weeks, Mr Syed employed this strategy, which he said worked like a charm. 'My pet won many medals,' he said.

UNPLEASANT SURPRISE

But late last month, Mr Syed got an unpleasant surprise when he found he could not log into his Facebook account.

He said: 'I checked my e-mail and was told that my account had been suspended. I was furious.'

The e-mail, from a Facebook customer support officer, said Mr Syed was suspected to have been running an automated script (or programme) on the networking site.

The reason for the suspicion was his extra-fast rate of browsing pages on Facebook. The staff member stated in the e-mail: 'We reserve the right to take any appropriate action in connection with any activities that violate our terms of use and/or applicable laws.'

The penalties for infringing the site's terms of use include account termination and legal action.

Mr Syed immediately e-mailed Facebook, explaining that he had managed to browse quickly because of the method he had devised.

In the e-mail, he also expressed his disappointment that they had terminated his account without first investigating.

After two days, his account was reactivated.

Online security expert Aloysius Cheang said sites such as Facebook prohibit users from running scripts on the site as a precaution against users with malicious intent.

He said: 'Some scripts include malicious code or viruses which could be used to steal passwords, for example.'

In a recent case, American blogger Robert Scoble had his Facebook account disabled after he tried using a script to move his contact list to another social networking site.

Like Mr Syed, he received an e-mail notifying him that he had possibly violated the site's terms of use.

Mr Syed said he was disappointed with Facebook for the inconvenience it caused him. He said: 'I thought it was very rude of Facebook to just disable my account before doing any investigation.

'They should first give users the benefit of the doubt. In this case, they should have first sent a warning letter instead of simply disabling my account.'