Grandma Wrongly Arrested Due to Facial Recognition Software Finally Released After Months in Jail

Angela Lipps, an innocent, 50-year-old grandma who was arrested after wrongfully being identified by facial recognition software, has finally been released.

Police in Fargo, North Dakota were investigating a series of bank fraud cases in which a fake U.S. Army military I.D. card was used to withdraw thousands of dollars.

Using facial recognition software, in this case Clearview AI, they identified Lipps as the suspect and arrested her at gunpoint in her home on July 14, 2025.

There was a slight problem though: she had never even been to North Dakota.

“It was so scary. I can still see it in my head, over and over again” Lipps said of her arrest to WDAY news. "I've never been to North Dakota, I don't know anyone from North Dakota.”

The Fargo police used facial recognition software that had falsely matched Lipps with the suspect. The detectives compared the surveillance footage with Lipps’ driver’s license photo and based on the resemblance, decided to pursue charges.

Later, her court-appointed attorney looked at her banking records and purchases made at the time and discovered that she had been in Tennessee during the each incident of fraud.

Her attorney, Jay Greenwood told WDAY News "Around the same time she's depositing Social Security checks ... she is buying cigarettes at a gas station, around the same time, she is buying a pizza, she is using a cash app to buy an Uber Eats."

Often, facial recognition technology is criticized for its potential for tracking individuals around using unchanging characteristics.

However, another problem has arisen: these technologies are highly flawed and produce false matches regularly, leading to false arrests.

The police in this case failed to do basic investigatory work to check if the AI system was accurate. Instead of using the technology to narrow down the potential suspects, they assumed it was correct without question.

Lipps spent five months wrongfully jailed, away from her family, her life disrupted and untold distress caused by simple laziness.

Facial recognition software fundamentally can’t determine if two pictures show the same person; all it can really do is show how similar the facial structures are. It can be affected by things like lighting, angle, the resolution of the picture, and myriad other factors.

This case is just the latest in a line of false arrests using facial recognition software.

The 2020 Robert Williams case was a landmark in the use of facial recognition. Williams was arrested at his home for felony larceny, his daughter watching as her father was taken away.

Facial recognition is about 100 times more likely to give a false positive for people of color.