A Facial Recognition Match on a Suspect's Fake ID Photo Jails an Innocent Tennessee Woman for 163 Days

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West Fargo Police Department detectives investigating a bank-fraud case ran facial recognition against a photograph taken from the suspect's fake identification, using an AI-powered facial recognition system the department had purchased on its own, one Fargo Police Department leadership was unaware of. The search returned Angela Lipps, a woman living roughly 1,200 miles away, according to Biometric Update, in Elizabethton, Tennessee, with no connection to North Dakota. Fargo detectives, to whom the match was forwarded, wrongly assumed West Fargo had already submitted the case's actual surveillance images to the North Dakota State and Local Intelligence Center, the state's certified facial-recognition hub, and never ran that verification themselves before seeking an arrest warrant. On July 14, 2025, a U.S. Marshals fugitive task force arrested Lipps at gunpoint at a neighbor's home while she was babysitting the neighbor's children, on eight North Dakota felony bank-fraud charges, the most serious carrying up to 10 years in prison. She spent the next 163 days in jail before prosecutors dismissed every charge on December 24, 2025, after her attorney produced bank records showing she was in Tennessee at the time of the thefts; according to the lawsuit, she was released that night with four cents to her name and no winter coat, in temperatures near 10 degrees. On March 24, 2026, then-Fargo Police Chief Dave Zibolski publicly confirmed the department's errors, saying of West Fargo's unauthorized facial-recognition system, "We would not have allowed that to be used and it has since been prohibited," and announced a new department policy, issued March 20, 2026, restricting facial-recognition requests to the Criminal Investigation Division, requiring unit-commander approval, permitting searches only through state or federal intelligence centers, and mandating monthly tracking. On September 15, 2026, Lipps filed a $10 million federal lawsuit against the City of Fargo and Fargo Police Detective Lucas Heck, alleging five claims - unlawful seizure and arrest, a due-process violation, false arrest and imprisonment, malicious prosecution, and a municipal claim over the city's policies and training - plus punitive damages against Heck personally. The complaint alleges Heck failed to disclose that the facial recognition result was based on a photo from the suspect's fake ID rather than the surveillance footage, and that he relied on the result in seeking an arrest warrant without corroborating it with other evidence, despite Lipps living in Tennessee, never having been to North Dakota, and not matching the suspect's physical description, according to the complaint. According to Biometric Update, the system used to identify Lipps was Clearview AI's facial recognition technology, licensed to the West Fargo Police Department.