Tennessee Grandmother Wrongly Jailed for Five Months After AI Facial Recognition Error

Woman Spent Five Months in Jail After A.I. Linked Her to Bank Fraud Case

The police chief in Fargo, N.D., acknowledged "missteps" but stopped short of apologizing to Angela Lipps, a Tennessee resident who said she had never been to North Dakota before she was arrested. It was Christmas Eve when Angela Lipps was released from jail in Fargo, N.D. She had spent more than five months behind bars after the police used a facial-recognition app to connect her to a bank fraud case in North Dakota, a state she had never visited until she was arrested in her home state, Tennessee, and taken there to face charges, she said. "I had my summer clothes on, no coat -- it was so cold outside, snow on the ground -- scared, I wanted out, but I didn't know what I was going to do, how I was going to get home," Ms. Lipps told a Fargo television station, WDAY. Last week, the Fargo police chief, David Zibolski, acknowledged "missteps" in the handling of Ms. Lipps's case and said the department had overhauled its artificial-intelligence policy. But he stopped short of apologizing to Ms. Lipps, 50, who is planning to sue the police, and said the investigation was continuing. "We're happy to acknowledge when we make errors, and we've made a few in this case, for sure," Chief Zibolski said at a news conference on March 24. He added, "We certainly apologize for any effect, or adverse effect, that this has had on trust in the community." Ms. Lipps's lawyers said they were still piecing together what went wrong in her case. But Jay Greenwood, who represented Ms. Lipps in the bank fraud case, said it was "a cautionary tale about the use of A.I. and facial recognition as the sole tool to make these kind of charging decisions." The authorities in North Dakota relied on facial-recognition technology to identify Ms. Lipps "but made zero other efforts to corroborate that identification," Mr. Greenwood said in an email on Monday. "Nor did they do any interviews with her or people in her orbit to determine whether they had the right person." As a result, Mr. Greenwood said, law enforcement officials held her in jail for more than five months in Tennessee and North Dakota "before realizing they had identified the wrong person." The case began when the Fargo police were investigating a string of bank fraud cases in April and May of 2025. In at least four of those cases, the same woman showed a fake military ID card with stolen personal information and withdrew money from a bank account or a home-equity line of credit, according to a Fargo police report. The West Fargo Police Department, which had a similar bank fraud case with video surveillance footage, asked its intelligence unit to identify a person of interest, using Clearview AI, a facial recognition app, the West Fargo police said. Clearview AI, which is based in New York, has scraped billions of photos from the web and from social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. It is used by hundreds of local police departments, the Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. The company says its technology was "designed to function as one tool within a broader investigative process." "It generates leads; it does not make identifications, draw conclusions, or recommend arrests," the company said in a statement. "When using Clearview AI's platform, independent corroboration by trained law enforcement professionals is required." In the North Dakota bank fraud investigation, Clearview AI "identified a potential suspect with similar features to Angela Lipps," the West Fargo police said in a statement. "That intelligence information was then shared with the Fargo Police Department, at their request, in relation to their open cases." A Fargo police detective then located Ms. Lipps's Facebook and Instagram accounts and her Tennessee driver's license photo, according to a Fargo police report. The detective determined that Ms. Lipps "does appear to be the suspect" in the bank fraud cases based on her facial features, body type and medium-long, blond-brown hair, the police report stated. The Cass County State's Attorney's Office in Fargo determined there was probable cause to charge Ms. Lipps with eight felonies -- four counts of unauthorized used of personal identifying information and four counts of property theft. On July 1, 2025, a judge signed an arrest warrant authorizing the nationwide extradition of Ms. Lipps to North Dakota, the Fargo police said. Law enforcement agents in Tennessee arrested Ms. Lipps on July 14, 2025, while she was babysitting four young children, WDAY reported. Ms. Lipps, who referred questions to her lawyers on Monday, told WDAY: "It was so scary. I can still see it in my head, over and over again." She was held in a county jail in Tennessee, initially on a probation violation, the Fargo police said. In October, she was moved to Fargo, where she was booked into jail on the bank fraud charges. "I've never been to North Dakota," Ms. Lipps told WDAY. "I don't know anyone from North Dakota." Mr. Greenwood said he had met with Ms. Lipps and then contacted her family and friends, who sent him records showing she had been making purchases and deposits in and around Elizabethton, Tenn., in April and May of 2025, when the bank frauds were taking place in Fargo. On Dec. 24, 2025, a judge dismissed the charges against Ms. Lipps, and she was released from jail. Local defense lawyers donated money for food and a hotel room before a volunteer drove her to Chicago to meet her family a couple of days later. At the news conference last week, a reporter asked Chief Zibolski, who has since retired, if the police should apologize to Ms. Lipps. He responded that the police were still investigating the bank frauds, which he said had been carried out by a large criminal organization. "So I think that's an appropriate question and response at the right time," he said. "But we do not know definitively who's involved and who's not at this juncture." Ms. Lipps's lawyers said there was no evidence that she had anything to do with the bank frauds. "I'm just glad it's over," Ms. Lipps told WDAY. "I'll never go back to North Dakota."

AI facial recognition led to a grandma being wrongly jailed

Police imprisoned an innocent woman for more than 5 months after Clearview AI wrongly flagged her a match to a bank fraud suspect. Credit: Sean Zanni/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images Angela Lipps, a 50-year-old grandma from Tennessee, spent more than five months in jail after the AI facial recognition platform Clearview AI falsely matched the grandmother with a suspect of bank fraud more than 1,000 miles away in North Dakota. Fargo police chief Dave Zibolski admitted to CNN that there were a "couple of errors" in the investigation that led to Lipps' arrest. A "partner agency's facial recognition technology" and "additional investigative steps independent of AI to assist in identification" led to a warrant being issued for Lipps, Zibolski said. The grandma was arrested on July 14 while looking after four children. Authorities in Tennessee held Lipps in county jail for 108 days before she was extradited to Fargo. Lipps says she had never even been to the state of North Dakota before her arrest. According to her GoFundMe page, Lipps found out that a woman in North Dakota stole tens of thousands of dollars from banks in Fargo using a fake military ID. Clearview AI matched the fake ID image with Lipps in Tennessee. The case against Lipps fell apart in December when the lawyer she was given in Fargo was able to produce bank records showing Lipps was at a gas station and ordering pizza in Tennessee at the time that authorities claimed she was in North Dakota. Lipps was released on Christmas Eve, after nearly 5 months in prison. Lipps says she lost her home, income, car, and health insurance as a result of her imprisonment. Clearview AI is a tech company that has plenty of charges from critics on its rap sheet already. it has created massive facial-scan databases by scraping photos from social media platforms and other places on the internet, then training its machine learning algorithms on them. In 2020, Facebook sent Clearview AI a cease and desist over the mass photo scraping. Other tech companies like YouTube, Twitter, and Venmo also requested that Clearview AI stop scraping its platforms. Clearview AI claimed it had a "First Amendment right" to the data. In 2022, a legal settlement with the ACLU resulted in Clearview AI agreeing to stop selling access to its tool to private businesses. However, it did not bar Clearview AI from working with law enforcement. While Fargo police have admitted to making mistakes in the investigation, authorities have not yet apologized to Lipps for her ordeal. Lipps' attorneys are currently looking at filing a civil rights claim.

Police Used AI as an Investigation 'Shortcut' and Sent an Innocent Grandmother to Jail for 5 Months

The use of an AI facial recognition tool led to a Tennessee grandmother spending more than five months in jail after police linked her to crimes committed in North Dakota -- a state she says she'd never been to before. Lipps' said her extradition to North Dakota was unnerving, "It was the first time I had ever been on an airplane," she wrote on her GoFundMe. "I was terrified and exhausted and humiliated." Her attorneys criticized what they characterized as a lack of "basic investigative efforts" before issuing Lipps' warrant. "Officers knew that Angela was a Tennessee resident, and we have seen no investigation by officers to determine whether she traveled to or was in North Dakota at the time of the bank thefts," Lipps' attorney said through a statement to media. "Instead, an officer used AI facial recognition as a shortcut for basic investigation, resulting in an innocent woman being detained and transported halfway across the country to answer for charges that she had nothing to do with."

Tennessee grandma jailed for 5 months after AI flagged her for bank fraud in state she never visited

A Tennessee grandmother was jailed for a whopping five months after a facial recognition program erroneously flagged her for bank fraud in a state she'd never visited. Angela Lipps, 50, was first arrested at her rental home in Tennessee in July. Lipps was extradited to Fargo, North Dakota -- more than 1,000 miles away from her home -- at the end of October, according to a GoFundMe campaign. The West Fargo Police Department had used "facial recognition technology" that flagged Lipps as a potential suspect in a local fraud case, Dave Zibolski, the Fargo Police Department's chief, told CNN. From there, his department took "additional investigative steps independent of AI to assist in identification" and confirm Lipps as a suspect. He admitted at a press conference Tuesday that the West Fargo police's system was "part of the issue" in Lipps' wrongful arrest. The West Fargo Police Department told CNN that they use Clearview AI, which "identified a potential suspect with similar features to Angela Lipps." Lipps was also detained in Tennessee for three months because the Cass County Sheriff's Office apparently neglected to tell North Dakota authorities that they had her extradition waiver, the outlet reported. Lipps said that her relocation to North Dakota was "the first time I had ever been on an airplane." She added it was the first, and last, time she will ever step foot in the Peace Garden State. By that point, Lipps was "terrified and exhausted and humiliated," she wrote on the GoFundMe, but the end still wasn't in sight. Once the grandmother finally touched down in Fargo, she was provided with a lawyer, who obtained bank records proving that she had been in Tennessee during the time of the fraud the department linked her to. "It took five minutes for the whole thing to fall apart. Five minutes," Lipps wrote on the fundraiser. On Dec. 23, just over five months since Lipps' arrest, a Fargo detective, the state's attorney and a judge "mutually agreed to dismiss the charges without prejudice to allow for further investigation," Fargo police told the outlet. Lipps was released on Christmas Eve -- but was still trapped between a rock and a hard place. During the five months she was in custody, Lipps' reputation was tarnished, her rental home was gone, and all of her belongings were seized when her storage unit bill went unpaid, she claimed in the GoFundMe. "I am not the same woman I was. I don't think I ever will be," Lipps wrote. The fundraiser cleared $68,000 on Sunday. Zibolski assured that the Fargo Police Department will no longer be "sending or utilizing information" from West Fargo's Clearview AI because "it's their own system, we don't know how it's run or how it's overseen." Zibolski added that all facial recognition identifications will also be shared with the department's Investigation Division commander on a monthly basis, "so that we can keep a closer eye on this evolving technology." He admitted that the department should've submitted surveillance photos associated with the fraud cases to the relevant agencies trained in facial recognition. In the wake of Lipps' whirlwind detainment, the department "immediately began measures to address" their gaffe and is in the process of identifying other potential suspects in the fraud case.