A Tennessee grandmother who spent six months in jail after facial recognition tech falsely linked her to a North Dakota bank fraud investigation now wants compensation for what happened. Angela Lipps is suing the City of Fargo and a Fargo Police Department detective for $10 million over the incident, which led to the loss of her home, car, and dog.
In July 2025, a team of US Marshals arrested 50-year-old Lipps in Tennessee at gunpoint while she was babysitting four young children. She was booked into the county jail in Tennessee as a fugitive from justice wanted in North Dakota.
What did the facial recognition do wrong though? The cops gave them a known fake ID and asked them does this look like anybody. Well, that fake ID did look like the innocent grandma in Tennessee. (Btw the surveillance footage of the actual suspect looked nothing like the fake ID or the innocent grandma.)
The FR service didn’t do anything wrong, the cops just took what was supposed to be an alert to a possible victim of identity theft, and turned it into a false arrest and kidnapping.
It’s like if you reported a crime and you tell the cops that the victims name is Jean Smith, and then they just go arrest her and throw her in jail for six months.