I had lucked my way into accessing TRW, the credit-reporting company, while still in high school. Nothing clever about this. One night I went out to the back of Galpin Ford in the San Fernando Valley and dug through the trash. It took about fifteen minutes, but my little Dumpster-diving expedition paid off. I found a bunch of credit reports on people buying cars from the dealership. Incredibly, printed out on each report was Galpin’s access code for TRW. (Even more incredible: they were still printing out the access code on each credit report years later.)