AI facial recognition blunder locks innocent Tennessee grandmother in jail for a crime 1,200 miles away

A Tennessee grandmother is now trying to rebuild her life after an artificial intelligence facial recognition system mistakenly identified her, leading to nearly six months in jail for a crime 1,200 miles away, as reported by The Guardian. Angela Lipps, 50, says she had never even been to North Dakota before authorities flew her there last year to face charges, and she certainly didn’t commit the bank fraud she was accused of.

Lipps, a mother of three and grandmother of five, has spent most of her life in north-central Tennessee. She was arrested by US marshals at gunpoint in July at her home while babysitting four children. She was then booked into a county jail as a fugitive from justice from North Dakota, a place she told WDAY News she had never visited and where she knew no one.

Fargo police records show detectives investigating bank fraud cases in April and May 2025 reviewed surveillance video of a woman using a fake US Army military ID to withdraw tens of thousands of dollars. Officers reportedly used facial recognition software to identify the suspect as Lipps. A detective even wrote in court documents that Lipps appeared to match the suspect based on facial features, body type, and hairstyle. Lipps mentioned that no one from the Fargo police department reached out to her before the arrest.

This whole situation is just genuinely awful to hear about, especially when an innocent person loses so much because of a digital misstep

She remained in a Tennessee jail for nearly four months without bail, waiting to be extradited, after being charged with four counts of unauthorized use of personal identifying information and four counts of theft. Authorities in North Dakota didn’t transport Lipps from Tennessee until the end of October, 108 days after her initial arrest. She finally appeared in a North Dakota courtroom the very next day.

Her attorney, Jay Greenwood, made a really smart point, stating that if facial recognition is the only piece of evidence, investigators should definitely dig a little deeper. Thankfully, Greenwood was able to obtain Lipps’s bank records and present them to investigators. These records clearly showed Lipps was more than 1,200 miles away in Tennessee when the fraud allegedly happened in Fargo.

Because of this undeniable proof, Lipps was finally released on Christmas Eve. But the ordeal didn’t end there. She says Fargo police didn’t pay for her trip home, leaving her stranded during the holidays. Luckily, some local defense attorneys stepped up to cover a hotel room and food on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and a local non-profit, the F5 Project, helped her get back to Tennessee.

This experience has had devastating, lasting consequences for Lipps. While she was jailed and unable to pay her bills, she lost her home, her car, and even her dog. To make matters worse, she stated that no one from the Fargo police department has apologized to her.

Sadly, this isn’t an isolated incident of AI getting it wrong with serious real-world consequences. Just last October, an AI system apparently mistook a Baltimore high school student’s bag of Doritos for a firearm, which led to police confronting and handcuffing the student, Taki Allen, only to find nothing.

Earlier this year, police in the UK arrested a man for a burglary in a city he had never even visited because face-scanning software confused him with another person of South Asian heritage. That’s a £3,000 burglary 100 miles away from where the mistaken man was. These cases really highlight the critical need for human oversight and verification when AI systems are involved in such sensitive areas.