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.”
As a result, Mr. Greenwood said, law enforcement officials held her in jail for more than five months in Tennessee and North Dakota “before realizing they had identified the wrong person.”
The case began when the Fargo police were investigating a string of bank fraud cases in April and May of 2025. In at least four of those cases, the same woman showed a fake military ID card with stolen personal information and withdrew money from a bank account or a home-equity line of credit, according to a Fargo police report.
The West Fargo Police Department, which had a similar bank fraud case with video surveillance footage, asked its intelligence unit to identify a person of interest, using Clearview AI, a facial recognition app, the West Fargo police said.
Clearview AI, which is based in New York, has scraped billions of photos from the web and from social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. It is used by hundreds of local police departments, the Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. The company says its technology was “designed to function as one tool within a broader investigative process.”
“It generates leads; it does not make identifications, draw conclusions, or recommend arrests,” the company said in a statement. “When using Clearview AI’s platform, independent corroboration by trained law enforcement professionals is required.”
In the North Dakota bank fraud investigation, Clearview AI “identified a potential suspect with similar features to Angela Lipps,” the West Fargo police said in a statement. “That intelligence information was then shared with the Fargo Police Department, at their request, in relation to their open cases.”
A Fargo police detective then located Ms. Lipps’s Facebook and Instagram accounts and her Tennessee driver’s license photo, according to a Fargo police report. The detective determined that Ms. Lipps “does appear to be the suspect” in the bank fraud cases based on her facial features, body type and medium-long, blond-brown hair, the police report stated.
The Cass County State’s Attorney’s Office in Fargo determined there was probable cause to charge Ms. Lipps with eight felonies — four counts of unauthorized used of personal identifying information and four counts of property theft. On July 1, 2025, a judge signed an arrest warrant authorizing the nationwide extradition of Ms. Lipps to North Dakota, the Fargo police said.
Law enforcement agents in Tennessee arrested Ms. Lipps on July 14, 2025, while she was babysitting four young children, WDAY reported. Ms. Lipps, who referred questions to her lawyers on Monday, told WDAY: “It was so scary. I can still see it in my head, over and over again.”
She was held in a county jail in Tennessee, initially on a probation violation, the Fargo police said. In October, she was moved to Fargo, where she was booked into jail on the bank fraud charges. “I’ve never been to North Dakota,” Ms. Lipps told WDAY. “I don’t know anyone from North Dakota.”
Mr. Greenwood said he had met with Ms. Lipps and then contacted her family and friends, who sent him records showing she had been making purchases and deposits in and around Elizabethton, Tenn., in April and May of 2025, when the bank frauds were taking place in Fargo.
On Dec. 24, 2025, a judge dismissed the charges against Ms. Lipps, and she was released from jail. Local defense lawyers donated money for food and a hotel room before a volunteer drove her to Chicago to meet her family a couple of days later.
At the news conference last week, a reporter asked Chief Zibolski, who has since retired, if the police should apologize to Ms. Lipps. He responded that the police were still investigating the bank frauds, which he said had been carried out by a large criminal organization.
“So I think that’s an appropriate question and response at the right time,” he said. “But we do not know definitively who’s involved and who’s not at this juncture.”
Ms. Lipps’s lawyers said there was no evidence that she had anything to do with the bank frauds.
“I’m just glad it’s over,” Ms. Lipps told WDAY. “I’ll never go back to North Dakota.”
Michael Levenson covers breaking news for The Times from New York.
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