A Tennessee grandmother spent nearly six months behind bars in North Dakota, a state she had never even stepped foot in, after being wrongfully identified by AI facial recognition technology in a bank fraud investigation.
The Grand Forks Herald reports that Angela Lipps, a 50-year-old mother of three and grandmother of five from Tennessee, found herself trapped in a nightmare that began last July when U.S. Marshals arrested her at gunpoint while she was babysitting four young children. Fargo police had used facial recognition software to identify her as the primary suspect in an organized bank fraud case, despite the fact that she had never set foot in North Dakota.
The case began in April and May 2025 when Fargo Police Department detectives investigated several bank fraud incidents. Surveillance footage captured a woman using a fraudulent U.S. Army military identification card to withdraw tens of thousands of dollars from local banks. To identify the suspect, investigators employed facial recognition software, which incorrectly matched the woman in the videos to Lipps.
According to court documents obtained through an open records request, the detective assigned to the case reviewed Lipps’ social media accounts and Tennessee driver’s license photo after receiving the facial recognition match. In the charging document, the detective stated that Lipps appeared to be the suspect based on facial features, body type, hairstyle, and hair color. Notably, no one from the Fargo Police Department contacted Lipps to question her before filing charges.
Lipps was arrested on July 14 and booked into her county jail in Tennessee as a fugitive from justice. She faced four counts of unauthorized use of personal identifying information and four counts of theft in North Dakota. Held without bail due to her fugitive status, Lipps spent 108 days in the Tennessee jail before North Dakota officers transported her to Fargo on October 30.
“It was so scary, I can still see it in my head, over and over again,” Lipps said during an interview about her ordeal.
Throughout her detention, Lipps maintained her innocence, telling anyone who would listen that she had never been to North Dakota and knew no one from the state. Her claims were supported by the fact that she had never flown on an airplane in her entire life, and her travels had been limited to states neighboring Tennessee.
Jay Greenwood, the attorney representing Lipps in North Dakota, immediately requested her bank records upon taking the case. “If the only thing you have is facial recognition, I might want to dig a little deeper,” Greenwood said.
The bank records proved conclusive. They showed that Lipps was in Tennessee, more than 1,200 miles away, during the times police claimed she was committing fraud in Fargo. The records documented routine transactions including Social Security check deposits, cigarette purchases at gas stations, pizza purchases, and Uber Eats orders through a cash app.
Fargo police finally interviewed Lipps for the first time on December 19, meeting with her and Greenwood at the Cass County jail. By that point, she had already spent more than five months incarcerated. Five days later, on Christmas Eve, prosecutors dismissed the case and released Lipps from custody.
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Most do not realize the extent of the security state. How they have normalized AI and simultaneously introduced the platform into the home, business, legal,, entertainment, educational, military, police aspects of society. It is being here in the US promoted as being necessary to compete. So much so that our current administration label it so important that the government is funding and partnering with private entities like Palantir. Rapidly the beast has replaced human decision making with machine programming. 2001 space odyssey inadvertently gave a glimpse of HAL where we are today on global scale. The imperfections of machine learning based upon human programming. The beast is at work to subjugate humanity by all means necessary. Replacing our ability to think for ourselves and decide for ourselves what is correct or not. There is an another quote that applies “you can’t reason with and it will never stop, ever” being able to buy and sell is just a mark away.
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