In a March 2026 press conference, the Fargo Police Department insisted it charged Angela Lipps based on both the AI identification and other evidence, although the police department has not specified what that other evidence was and had already dismissed Lipps' charges months prior.
In July 2026, various Instagram accounts shared a claim about a grandmother they said was wrongly jailed because police relied on an artificial intelligence tool that misidentified her as a suspect in a crime far from her home. For example, one Instagram post (archived) claimed, "AI wrongly linked a grandmother to a fraud case, and she spent 6 months behind bars. She lost her home, her car, and her dog after police arrested her at gunpoint while she was babysitting her grandkids."
Various (archived) other (archived) posts (archived) claimed that police arrested Angela Lipps, a 50-year-old woman from Tennessee, and jailed her as a suspect in a North Dakota bank fraud investigation because AI facial recognition tools falsely identified Lipps as a suspect. Snopes readers wrote in to ask if the story was true.
The claim is true, based on press conferences held by the Fargo Police Department, an interview of Lipps' defense attorney Jay Greenwood and local news reporting on the case. The Fargo Police Department in Fargo, North Dakota, was the police department that requested the warrant for Lipps and charged her.
The attention on the case, as well as investigations into what happened and the release of details on it to the public, appeared to originate from a local news investigation into it after Lipps was jailed and released. On March 11, 2026, WBAY, a Fargo TV news channel and news outlet InForum, which are both owned by the same parent company, reported that U.S. Marshals arrested Lipps July 14, 2025, from her Tennessee home. She was held without bail at her county jail for several months, then extradited to Fargo based on AI facial recognition technology. According to the reports, the AI tool incorrectly identified Lipps as the suspect surveillance footage showed using a fake military ID to withdraw money from a Fargo bank.
The charges against Lipps were dismissed, according to the reporting, on Dec. 24, 2025, five days after her first interview with the police. She was released on that date.
In the weeks following the WBAY report, local officials began acknowledging and responding to growing local interest in the case.
On March 16, 2026, the Fargo city board of commissioners consulted with attorneys "in anticipation of reasonably predictable or pending civil or criminal litigation involving Angela Lipps."