On July 14 of last year, Angela Lipps was at her Tennessee home babysitting four children when armed police officers came and took her away at gunpoint. She was later booked as a fugitive in relation to a bank fraud investigation in North Dakota, over 1,000 miles away. The only problem was that Lipps had never been to North Dakota.
The grandmother of five told investigators that she had lived most of her life in north-central Tennessee and had never even been on a plane. Unfortunately, police in Fargo, North Dakota, had obtained a signed warrant for her arrest on multiple charges, including felony theft and felony unauthorised use of personal identifying information.
Angela Lipps later learned that she had been identified as a suspect in an organised bank fraud case. Investigators reviewing cases in April and May 2025, in which a woman used a fake US Army military ID to withdraw tens of thousands of dollars from banks, used facial recognition software on surveillance camera footage and identified the Tennessee grandmother as the main suspect.
The West Fargo Police Department told CNN that the AI facial recognition software they used in the investigation “identified a potential suspect with similar features to Angela Lipps”, and someone apparently thought that this was enough to have the woman arrested.
“If the only thing you have is facial recognition, I might want to dig a little deeper,” Angela’s attorney told WDAY News.
After spending over three months in a Tennessee jail, at the end of October 2025, Angela Lipps was put on a plane and flown to North Dakota, where she was once again jailed simply because an AI recognition software decided her facial features, body type and hairstyle matched those of a crime suspect.
On December 23, the detective in the bank fraud case, the state’s attorney and the judge who had signed her arrest warrant “mutually agreed to dismiss the charges without prejudice to allow for further investigation.” At this point, Angela Lipps’ attorney had produced her bank records, which clearly showed that she had been about 1,200 miles away in Tennessee when the crimes were committed.
Angela was released from custody in North Dakota on Christmas Eve, without so much as an apology. She was left stranded in a place she didn’t know, with no way of returning home. Her attorney helped cover a hotel room and food on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and a non-profit eventually helped fly her home.
Apart from the trauma and humiliation Angela Lipps had to endure throughout this six-month ordeal, the Tennessee woman also ended up losing her house and her pets, because she couldn’t pay her bills. Her lawyers are currently exploring civil rights claims but have yet to file a lawsuit. As for Angela, she’s just glad the nightmare is finally over.
“I’m just glad it’s over,” she told WDAY. “I’ll never go back to North Dakota.”
