A Tennessee grandmother spent five months in prison for a crime committed 1,000 miles away until it was found that she never left her hometown to begin with. Angela Lipps, a 50-year-old grandmother of five from Elizabethton, Tennessee, was arrested in July 2025 after facial recognition software wrongly linked her to a bank fraud case in Fargo, North Dakota.
Lipps was finally released on Christmas Eve, but not before losing her home, her car, her reputation, and even her dog. According to Fox News, the case began when Fargo police investigated reports of bank fraud involving a suspect who allegedly used a fake military ID. Detectives reviewed surveillance footage and submitted still images from poorly placed security cameras to a facial recognition system operated by the North Dakota State Intelligence Center.
