A woman spent five months behind bars after police facial recognition software mistakenly matched her to a suspect they were trying to locate.
In July 2025, officers arrived at Angela Lipp’s rental home in Tennessee and reportedly arrested her at gunpoint while she was babysitting four young children.
According to a GoFundMe set up on her behalf, Lipp was held in a Tennessee county jail for more than 100 days before she was extradited to Fargo, North Dakota — roughly 1,000 miles from home — in October.
Lipp says that while she was detained in Tennessee, no one interviewed her before she was flown to Fargo, which she says was the first time she had ever been on an airplane.
She also alleges she was escorted through the airport in handcuffs in full view of other travelers, leaving her feeling “terrified and exhausted and humiliated”.
After arriving in Fargo, she says she finally gained access to legal representation. Her attorney then used bank records to show she was in Tennessee during the period when the alleged crimes took place.
Investigators believed the mother of three was connected to a string of bank fraud cases in and around Fargo — a city Lipp insists she has never visited.
Lipp says the facial recognition tool linked her to the allegations because she shared “similar features” with the suspect police were seeking.
She also claims her lawyer did not meet with a detective to present her side until December 19.
“It took five minutes for the whole thing to fall apart,” she wrote. “Five minutes.”
On December 24, the charges against her were dismissed — after she had spent more than five months in jail.
Lipp says that during her incarceration she lost her rental home, her storage unit, her social security income, and other possessions. She also says she spent her 50th birthday in custody.
Now describing herself as having lost “everything,” she has sought help through crowdfunding. At the time of writing, her GoFundMe total is approaching $80,000.
Following the incident, the Fargo Police Department acknowledged there were “a few errors”.
Chief Dave Zibolski told CNN in an email that the department relied on “our partner agency’s facial recognition technology” along with “additional investigative steps independent of AI to assist in identification”.
He later said at a news conference that the AI system is “part of the issue”.
“At some point, our partner agency over at West Fargo purchased their own AI facial recognition system that we were not aware of at the executive level,” Zibolski said, adding: “We would not have allowed that to be used, and it has since been prohibited.”