Woman Spent Five Months in Jail After A.I. Linked Her to Bank Fraud Case

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Woman Spent Five Months in Jail After A.I. Linked Her to Bank Fraud Case

The police chief in Fargo, N.D., acknowledged “missteps” but stopped short of apologizing to Angela Lipps, a Tennessee resident who said she had never been to North Dakota before she was arrested.

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Angela Lipps outside her home in Elizabethton, Tenn., before she was arrested in July 2025. She spent five months in jail in Tennessee and North Dakota before she was released on Dec. 24.

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Angela Lipps

By

Michael Levenson

March 30, 2026,

5:42 p.m. ET

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It was Christmas Eve when Angela Lipps was released from jail in Fargo, N.D.

She had spent more than five months behind bars after the police used a facial-recognition app to connect her to a bank fraud case in North Dakota, a state she had never visited until she was arrested in her home state, Tennessee, and taken there to face charges, she said.

“I had my summer clothes on, no coat — it was so cold outside, snow on the ground — scared, I wanted out, but I didn’t know what I was going to do, how I was going to get home,” Ms. Lipps told a Fargo television station,

WDAY

.

Last week, the Fargo police chief, David Zibolski, acknowledged “missteps” in the handling of Ms. Lipps’s case and said the department had overhauled its artificial-intelligence policy. But he stopped short of apologizing to Ms. Lipps, 50, who is planning to sue the police, and said the investigation was continuing.

“We’re happy to acknowledge when we make errors, and we’ve made a few in this case, for sure,” Chief Zibolski said at a news conference on March 24. He added, “We certainly apologize for any effect, or adverse effect, that this has had on trust in the community.”

Ms. Lipps’s lawyers said they were still piecing together what went wrong in her case. But Jay Greenwood, who represented Ms. Lipps in the bank fraud case, said it was “a cautionary tale about the use of A.I. and facial recognition as the sole tool to make these kind of charging decisions.”

The authorities in North Dakota relied on facial-recognition technology to identify Ms. Lipps “but made zero other efforts to corroborate that identification,” Mr. Greenwood said in an email on Monday. “Nor did they do any interviews with her or people in her orbit to determine whether they had the right person.”

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