A MAN who was chopped in half after a horror forklift crash has told how trolls have stolen his identity in a “fake profile” on social media.
Former construction worker Loren Schauers was driving the vehicle over a bridge when he veered off and fell 50 feet before being crushed by the four-ton truck.
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He was just 18 when the devastating accident happened in Great Falls, Montana, in September 2019.
Following his horrific ordeal, Loren underwent a drastic hemicorporectomy operation – amputating everything below the waist.
The lower part of his right arm was also amputated, and he has since been fitted with a bionic limb.
During his long road to recovery, Loren and his wife Sabia, 27, have won legions of fans by sharing details of their life on YouTube.
But Loren has now hit out after a fake profile purporting to be him and Sabia appeared on Facebook.
He wrote on the platform, “Yet another impersonator page y’all, you know the drill.”
The false profile, created in May, has attracted 25,000 followers and features hundreds of video posts taken from Loren’s genuine page and his YouTube channel.
Loren added, “Go and report them and leave reviews letting people know they’re fake please!”
It is not the first time Loren and Sabia have been targeted by trolls.
In 2022, Loren revealed how conspiracy theorists accused him of using the couple’s GoFundMe page as a scam.
“I’ve seen a couple of comments that have said like this is a pretty elaborate scam,” he said at the time.
Sabia added that an entire social media thread had been created in an attempt to expose the couple as frauds.
She said, “There are people out there who think we’re using CGI to make Loren’s limbs disappear and that it’s all one big scam.
“When we first kind of went viral there was like a subreddit page that was all about how this is a scam and we’re lying about it and we’re doing editing to make his body disappear and those are just like crazy.
“The conspiracies some people come up with but like obviously we just laughed at it and ignored it because we’re not going to let that get to us but like it’s just crazy.”
To prove the trolls wrong, Loren hoisted himself up so he was hanging by one hand to reveal the bottom of his torso during a live stream.
After the accident, the hemicorperectomy was the only way to save Loren’s life, but his mom and sister did not know if he would rather die.
She said doctors agreed to wake Loren, and he was immediately aware something terrible had happened.
Surgeons then asked if he wanted the amputation, warning, “You’ll lose the lower half of your body or you may die in surgery.”
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Sabia said, “From that moment, I knew he wasn’t going anywhere.
“He looked them dead in the eye and told them he didn’t care if he was just a head on a plate, they’re going to do the surgery and they’re going to keep him alive.
“That really brought a lot of hope for us, that he was a fighter, but we already knew that because he was still alive.”
Loren said later, “It wasn’t a hard choice to have half of my body amputated – it was basically a choice of living or dying.”
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