Running what was possibly the first recorded Ponzi scheme, she offered large returns on investments by continually using the money of new investors to pay back the previous ones.

Spitzeder performed as a folk singer, living off friends and benefactors, but she never left her criminal life completely behind her, resulting in further trials and periods of incarceration.

[5] King Ludwig I offered him and his wife a salary of 6,000 gulden yearly if they took a permanent engagement at the National Theater, which led to the family moving to Munich.

[4] Betty then married Franz Maurer and took an engagement at the Carltheater in Vienna in 1840, where Spitzeder attended a Höhere Mädchenschule run by the order of the Ursulines; after a year, she entered the convent's boarding school.

[10] Wanting to follow in her parents' footsteps and against her mother's wishes, Spitzeder studied with Munich actresses Konstanze Dahn and Charlotte von Hagn.

[15] Since there were no vacancies at Coburg, she left the Hofbühne to take an engagement at Mannheim before returning to Munich for a few guest roles at the National Theatre.

[32] According to a contemporary story in Harper's Weekly, Spitzeder also placed an advertisement in the city's major newspaper, the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, asking to borrow 150 gulden with the promise of 10 percent interest after two months.

[33] Another contemporary source, a 1872 article in the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten citing her indictment, claims her first money lending activities started in the spring of 1869.

[34] Spitzeder's banking services quickly became the talk of the town in Munich's poorer communities thanks to favorable word-of-mouth advertising and soon, more people gave her their savings.

[48][49] In her doctoral thesis, Hannah Davies recounts the case of Johann Baptist Placht, who in 1874 was indicted for running a Ponzi scheme in Vienna and notes that contemporaries compared his business model to Spitzeder's.

[50] Unlike Placht and other fraudsters, Spitzeder never made claims of investing the money and explicitly gave no securities, which paradoxically led customers to trust her more.

[37] In 1872, the Munich Commerce Court decided that she had to enter her business in the register of companies, revising its earlier decision, which included rules about proper accounting.

[4] In the fall of 1872, Bavaria's Minister of the Interior had to report to the king that the Sparkasse of Altötting had to resort to drastic measures to pay out all its customers who wished to invest with Spitzeder instead and the president of the government of Upper Bavaria noted on 29 October 1872 that the large amount of withdrawals might force the Sparkasse of Ingolstadt to recall its debts to be able to meet payout demands.

[57] As a consequence, the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior placed large scale advertisements in a major newspaper on 30 October and 5 November 1872, warning customers to no longer invest with Spitzeder.

[62] The long lines of waiting customers were often entertained by musical groups playing outside the bank and she provided free meals and drinks at the tavern "Wilhelm Tell" next door.

[65][66] Spitzeder made generous donations to the Church, ostensibly for charity, and partook in regular pilgrimages to the Shrine of Our Lady of Altötting.

[68] She also opened the "Münchner Volksküche" (Munich peoples' kitchen) at the Platzl, a tavern providing beer and food at discounted prices and with seating for up to 4,000 patrons, strengthening her image as the "angel for the poor".

The foremost of her critics was the liberal Münchner Neueste Nachrichten which in 1870 began calling Spitzeder a fraudster and kept questioning her honesty and business practices until the end.

[70] In reaction to it, she placed an ad in every major newspaper – except the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, which refused to print it – challenging her critics to demonstrate that she enticed her customers to give her money or that they were being disadvantaged.

[71] After attempts to bribe the Münchner Neuste Nachrichten's editor in chief, August Napoleon Vecchioni, to cease their criticism failed,[72] Spitzeder turned to the newspaper's main rival, the Catholic-conservative Volksbote.

[74] Other conservative Catholic newspapers, especially Das Bayerische Vaterland published by Johann Baptist Sigl, also supported her and characterized criticism of Spitzeder as attempts by "Jewish capital" to discredit a pious and hard-working woman, tapping into the widespread antisemitism of the times.

[80] Spitzeder withstood the pressure levied against her by the authorities[32] and the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten[32] for a while, mainly because banking laws and financial regulations were non-existent[32] and because a few years prior, Bavaria had introduced legislation that allowed almost any business to operate with almost no oversight.

[83] The Münchner Neueste Nachrichten started a new attack on Spitzeder in the fall of 1872, repeating the warnings of the authorities, explaining the possible ways the government might intervene and prophesying the immediate demise of the bank.

[4][32] Spitzeder's house was closed by the police and soldiers and policemen were placed on the premises to safeguard the remaining items of value and prevent acts of aggression by the populace.

[32] Spitzeder was accused of failure to keep books, embezzlement of customers' funds and excessive wasting of money; she was sentenced in July 1873 to three years and ten months in prison for fraudulent bankruptcy.

[88][96] In it, she had formulated plans for after her release from prison, such as opening a brewery in the Au, a large restaurant in western Munich, and a horse racing track near Nymphenburg Palace, none of which came to fruition.

[88] After releasing her memoir, she again began to give out promissory notes that now contained explicit warnings that she was not providing any security and that the creditor has to be willing to waive any rights of reimbursement if she was not able to pay them back.

[33] Despite her demonstrative Christian demeanor at a time when official Catholic doctrine declared homosexuality a sin, she tended to have an entourage composed mostly of young, attractive women.

[28][103] The relationship continued into Spitzeder's banking career which Stier was actively supporting, with the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten soon reporting on "two tricksters that take people's money".

[107] Originally from Augsburg, Ehinger had dreams of becoming an actress, so Spitzeder, 19 years her senior, took the young woman, who soon started working in her bank, in and showered her with lavish gifts.