A Tennessee grandmother spent more than five months in jail after police used AI facial recognition technology to wrongly link her to bank fraud crimes committed in North Dakota, a state she says she had never visited. Fargo police have acknowledged “a few errors” in the case but stopped short of issuing a direct apology.
Angela Lipps, 50, was arrested in Tennessee on July 14, 2025, according to a statement from the Fargo Police Department. A warrant for her arrest had been issued weeks earlier in Fargo, over 1,000 miles from her Tennessee home, following several instances of bank fraud in the North Dakota area.
The misidentification occurred when West Fargo police used Clearview AI, a startup with a database of billions of photos scraped from the internet including social media. “Clearview identified a potential suspect with similar features to Angela Lipps” and West Fargo police shared that report with Fargo police, according to a police statement. West Fargo police noted they “didn’t have enough evidence to charge anyone for the fraud case.”
Fargo Police Chief Dave Zibolski said at a Tuesday news conference that his department’s reliance on information from the neighboring agency’s AI system was “part of the issue.” He revealed that “our partner agency over at West Fargo purchased their own AI facial recognition system that we were not aware of at the executive level,” adding that “we would not have allowed that to be used, and it has since been prohibited.”
Lipps spent over three months in a Tennessee jail before being extradited to North Dakota, where she faced multiple charges including felony theft and felony unauthorized use of personal identifying information. A North Dakota judge had signed the warrant with nationwide extradition on July 1, 2025.
The case highlights ongoing concerns about police departments’ rapid integration of AI technologies. It remains unclear what additional evidence beyond the facial recognition match was used to tie Lipps to the crimes, or why Tennessee authorities took months to notify North Dakota counterparts about her arrest.
