A Tennessee woman who was falsely charged with bank theft in North Dakota and jailed for six months has sued for $10m in damages, alleging in a federal lawsuit that Fargo police improperly relied on an artificial intelligence (AI) facial recognition system to wrongly accuse her.

Angela Lipps, 50, was arrested at gunpoint by US marshals at her home in Tennessee while babysitting her neighbor’s four children in July 2025. The mother of three and grandmother of five was booked into a county jail and remained there for almost four months without bail while awaiting extradition to North Dakota, where she was held for about two more months.

Lipps, who has lived most of her life in north-central Tennessee, had never been on a plane until authorities flew her to North Dakota at the end of October, where she was charged with four counts of unauthorized use of personal identifying information and four counts of theft.

The charges were ultimately dropped, and she was “released into the freezing cold … on Christmas Eve with no way to get home” after her lawyer, Jay Greenwood, provided bank records proving that she was in Tennessee at the time the fraud occurred in Fargo, the complaint says.