Angela Lipps, a 50-year-old grandmother from Tennessee, is suing for $10 million after a false AI facial recognition match put her in jail for six months. And that is only the beginning of the bizarre tale.
In July 2025, Lipps, of Elizabethton, Tennessee, stated she was taking care of her neighbor’s four little children when police arrived at the house and took her into custody at gunpoint.
After someone knocked at her door, about a dozen armed people began yelling for her to come outside and raise her hands. They were members of the U.S. Marshals’ Smokey Mountain Fugitive Task Force sent to apprehend her and extradite her to North Dakota.
Once inside, the officers held her at gunpoint, allegedly forced her hands behind her back and instructed her to “shut the f— up and stop weeping.” They then started yelling about something related to North Dakota.
She had no ties to North Dakota and didn’t even look like the suspect that was caught on camera
Angela Lipps was arrested because a detective used AI facial recognition to identify her as a suspect in a series of bank thefts in Fargo and West Fargo, North Dakota, during April and May 2025. She had no other ties to the crime or the state, had no connection to bank thefts or the funds that were taken, and did not physically match the suspect caught on multiple surveillance videos.
“I’ve never been to North Dakota, I don’t know anyone from North Dakota,” Lipps told WDAY News.
Lipps was extradited following her arrest and was reportedly held on a $100,000 bond because she was deemed a flight risk. She was accused of eight felonies, the most serious of which carries a maximum sentence of ten years in jail.
“I sat in a county jail in Tennessee for 108 days,” Lipps said in a GoFundMe post. “They said I was fugitive from justice. I had no bail. No one interviewed me. I just sat and waited.”
Before being flown to North Dakota, about 1,200 miles from her home, the mother of three and grandmother of five had never even been on a plane. There, she was charged with four counts of unauthorized use of personal identifying information and four counts of theft.
She was released on Christmas Eve with no way to get back to Tennessee
On December 24, 2025, five and a half months after her arrest, the prosecution dropped all charges when her lawyer provided bank records proving she was in Tennessee when the crimes occurred in North Dakota.
After Lipps was released from jail, Fargo police did not pay her transportation costs to get back home. She was “released into the freezing cold … on Christmas Eve with no way to get home,” according to her lawsuit.
After she was released, she discovered that she had lost her home, car, and personal belongings. Lipps lawsuit claims she suffered “lasting hardships and trauma that might be managed but never erased” as a result of the experience.
“She struggled with the fear of not knowing when she would be released or whether she would end up wrongly convicted and imprisoned for years,” the lawsuit continues. “She missed family birthdays. She spent her own birthday incarcerated, separated from her family. She missed holidays with her loved ones, including Thanksgiving and Christmas. While in custody, she was denied basic care, such as her medications and her dentures.”
How did this happen?
According to Angela Lipps’s lawsuit, a West Fargo police detective used AI facial recognition software to identify potential suspects. The system returned Lipps’s social media snapshot as a possible lead.
The lawsuit claims that a fake ID used by a female suspect caught on camera caused the facial recognition match. Lipps had never visited North Dakota and did not resemble the female suspect.
The investigator filed an arrest warrant while falsely claiming that facial recognition technology had identified Lipps, without conducting further research or establishing adequate reasonable cause, the lawsuit claims, according to the Guardian.
“They knew that AI facial recognition technology should not be used as the sole basis to extradite and charge a person,” the lawsuit alleges. “Yet they ignored those issues and gave no care to the harm it would do to innocent people like Lipps.
“As AI facial recognition technology becomes more accessible and widespread, Lipps hopes that her case will cause officers to use appropriate care and consider the harm their actions can have on those who are wrongly accused.”