A grandmother was wrongly imprisoned because of an artificial intelligence error

A grandmother was wrongfully arrested and held in prison for months after an AI facial recognition system misidentified her as a suspect in a bank fraud case.

A disturbing report by North Dakota radio station WDAY details how Angela Lipps, 50, spent nearly six months in jail after Fargo police, using an AI facial recognition tool, mistakenly identified her as a suspect in a bank fraud case in the state.

A mother of three and grandmother of five, Lipps says she has lived her entire life in north-central Tennessee, about a thousand miles from where the alleged crimes took place. Police showed up at her door in July, while she was taking care of four children, and arrested her at gunpoint.

Lipps was initially imprisoned into a Tennessee county jail as a fugitive from justice in North Dakota. Because she was considered a fugitive, she was held without bail and spent nearly four months in that jail. Lipps was given a court-appointed attorney for her extradition hearing and was informed that she would have to travel to North Dakota to contest the charges.

“I’ve never been to North Dakota, I don’t know anyone from North Dakota”, Lipps told WDAY.

According to Fargo Police Department records, the error emerged from surveillance footage that detectives viewed during bank fraud investigations in April and May 2025. The footage showed a woman using a fake U.S. Army ID to withdraw tens of thousands of dollars.

To identify the suspect, detectives turned to AI facial recognition software, which identified Lipps as the person in the video.

It appears that the police did little to verify the information provided by the AI. Court documents show that a detective agreed that the suspect’s facial features, body, and hair matched Lipps’s. However, Lipps says no one from the Fargo Police Department ever called to question her.

Moreover, Fargo police did not pick up Lipps from the Tennessee jail until 108 days after her arrest, after which she was flown to North Dakota to appear in court. The first time she was interviewed was in December while she was being held in the North Dakota jail after spending more than five months behind bars.

“If the only evidence you have is facial recognition, maybe you should dig a little deeper”, said Jay Greenwood, the attorney representing Lipps in North Dakota.

Greenwood presented bank statements that showed Lipps was more than 1,200 miles away in Tennessee at the time investigators say the bank fraud was committed. Thanks to Greenwood doing the police’s job for them, his client was released from jail on Christmas Eve and the case was closed.

Lipps says the police simply abandoned her in a foreign state, penniless, and without even providing her with a means to return home, leaving her stranded on the streets of Fargo. Her empathic lawyers raised money to pay for a hotel room, and a local nonprofit arranged her trip back to Tennessee.

“I had summer clothes, no coat, it was so cold outside, snow on the ground, I was scared, I wanted to leave, but I didn’t know what to do, how to get home”, Lipps said.

Lipps lost her house, car and dog due to her time in prison. No one from the Fargo Police Department has apologized for the disastrous mix-up, she added.

This isn’t the only case of misidentification caused by AI tools. Last April, the New York Police Department arrested a man named Trevis Williams based on a facial match to blurry surveillance footage, even though Williams was much taller than the suspect in the surveillance footage. In February, a Detroit woman sued the city’s police department, claiming she was arrested after a facial recognition tool identified her as a murder suspect, despite obvious differences between her appearance and that of the real killer.

yogaesoteric
April 2, 2026

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