Back in July 2025, officers arrived at Angela Lipp’s rental home in Tennessee and arrested her at gunpoint. The arrest happened in front of four young children she had been babysitting at the time, making the situation even more distressing.
After being taken into custody, Lipp was later extradited to Fargo, North Dakota, which is roughly 1,000 miles away from her home. This happened in October, after she had already spent more than 100 days in a Tennessee county jail, according to details shared on a GoFundMe page set up to support her.
The flight itself was also a first for her, as she had never been on a plane before. She described being escorted through the airport in handcuffs, in full view of the public, which left her feeling scared, drained, and deeply embarrassed.
Despite this, police had believed that Lipp was connected to several cases of bank fraud that had taken place in and around Fargo, a city she says she had never even visited before.
The reason she was linked to the crimes came down to facial recognition technology. The system flagged her as a match because she shared ‘similar features’ with the actual suspect officers were trying to identify.
“It took five minutes for the whole thing to fall apart,” she wrote. “Five minutes.”
Just a few days later, on December 24, all charges against her were dropped. By that point, she had already spent more than five months in jail for something she did not do.
After losing so much, she has turned to the public for help. Her GoFundMe campaign has received strong support, with donations approaching $80,000 at the time of writing.
Following the incident, the Fargo Police Department admitted that there had been mistakes in how the case was handled.
Speaking at a news conference, he acknowledged that the AI system played a role in what went wrong.
“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.”
