What happened
Police in North Dakota were looking for a woman who had used a fake ID at several banks near Fargo. An investigator ran the ID photo through face-matching software. It flagged a photo from the social media of Angela Lipps, a grandmother in Tennessee.
In July 2025, Lipps was arrested while babysitting. She was held for about six months, first in Tennessee and then in North Dakota, on a $100,000 bond. According to her lawsuit, she “did not look like the suspect” on the bank cameras, and she had never been to North Dakota.
The charges were dropped on Christmas Eve 2025, after she and her lawyer showed bank records proving she was in Tennessee when the thefts happened.
In September 2026 she sued the City of Fargo and a detective for $10 million.
Why it went wrong
The software only suggested a possible match. Her lawsuit says police treated it as proof, asked for an arrest warrant without checking properly, and did not compare her with the camera footage closely enough. A former police chief has admitted there were “errors.”
Impact
- Six months of a woman’s life taken from her family.
- “Can you imagine being taken away at gunpoint, held in detention, taken from your family?” her lawyer said.
The lesson
- A computer match is a lead, not proof. Someone still has to check it.
- Simple checks would have cleared her. Where was she on the day? Bank records answered that.
- Mistakes like this land on real people. She is far from the only one wrongly arrested this way.