Featured Image Credit: Fargo Police Department
Topics: Police, Artificial Intelligence, US News, GoFundMe
Niamh Shackleton
Topics: Police, Artificial Intelligence, US News, GoFundMe
A woman ended up spending five months in jail after a police department's facial recognition technology wrongly identified her as a criminal they'd been on the hunt for.
In July 2025, police turned up to Angela Lipp's rental home in Tennessee and reportedly arrested her at gunpoint in front of the four young kids she had been babysitting.
Lipp went on to be extradited to Fargo, North Dakota, some 1,000 miles away from her home, in October after spending more than 100 days in Tennessee county jail, per a GoFundMe page that's been created for her.
According to Lipp, while she was in custody in Tennessee nobody interviewed her before being jetted to Fargo, which marked the first time Lipp had ever been on a plane.
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Allegedly, she was walked through the airport while handcuffed in front of everyone, leaving Lipp feeling 'terrified and exhausted and humiliated'.
Once she arrived in Fargo she was finally given access to a lawyer who used her bank records to prove that she was at home in Tennessee at the time of the crimes Lipp had been accused of committing.
Police were under the impression that the mother-of-three was linked to several instances of bank fraud that had occurred in and around Fargo (where Lipp insists she's never visited before).
The AI facial recognition pinned Lipp to the crimes because she had 'similar features' to a suspect cops had been searching for.
Lipp says that her lawyer didn't sit down with a detective to plea her case until December 19.
"It took five minutes for the whole thing to fall apart," she wrote. "Five minutes."
Then, on December 24, the charges Lipp had been facing were dismissed after she had spent over five months in jail.
In the time she'd been incarcerated, Lipp lost her rental home, her storage unit, her social security income, and numerous other things. She also says that she spent her 50th birthday behind bars.
Since Lipp has lost 'everything', she's asking kindhearted people for money — and she's received just that. At the time of writing, her GoFundMe page is nearing $80,000 in donations.
In the wake of the whole debacle, Fargo Police Department have acknowledged that there were 'a few errors'.
Chief Dave Zibolski told CNN in an email that his department used 'our partner agency’s facial recognition technology' as well as 'additional investigative steps independent of AI to assist in identification'.
He then said in 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."