A Tennessee grandmother spent nearly six months in jail after an artificial intelligence facial recognition system mistakenly linked her to a bank fraud case in North Dakota. Angela Lipps, 50, was arrested in July at her home while babysitting four children, taken at gunpoint, and held as a fugitive from justice.
Fargo police used facial recognition software to identify Lipps as a suspect in an organised bank fraud investigation. Detectives had reviewed surveillance footage of a woman using a fake US army military ID to withdraw tens of thousands of dollars. A detective wrote in court documents that Lipps appeared to match the suspect based on facial features, body type and hairstyle.
Lipps, who said she had never been to North Dakota, spent nearly four months in a Tennessee jail without bail before being extradited. She was charged with four counts of unauthorised use of personal identifying information and four counts of theft. Her attorney, Jay Greenwood, obtained her bank records showing she was more than 1,200 miles away in Tennessee at the time of the fraud.
Lipps was released on Christmas Eve after the records were presented to investigators. However, Fargo police did not pay for her return trip, leaving her stranded. Local defence attorneys and a non-profit helped cover her travel home. Lipps said she lost her home, car and dog while jailed, and received no apology from police.
This case adds to a series of AI facial recognition errors. In October, an AI system mistook a Baltimore student's bag of Doritos for a firearm, leading to a police confrontation. Earlier this year, a man in the UK was arrested for a burglary 100 miles away after face-scanning software confused him with another person of south Asian heritage.
