Considering that Intelius, the Bellevue-based online people-searching/background-checking web service is frequently called a “scam” by its customers and “sleazy” by SW‘s Nina Shapiro (who wrote a cover piece last year about slippery CEO Naveen Jain and Intelius’ class-action lawsuits), it should come as no surprise that company co-founder and now-former executive vice president John K. Arnold has been convicted of lying. It was a big enough lie—he said he didn’t have sex at Frank Colacurcio’s strip joints—that they made a federal case out of it.

Men chronically lie about sex, but Arnold’s problem was that he lied about it to a U.S. grand jury. He was being questioned last year by federal prosecutors probing racketeering and prostitution charges against Colacurcio, his son, and business partners at Rick’s in Lake City and three other strip clubs. That prosecution has ended with plea bargains by Frank Jr. and the partners, as well as the death of Frank Sr. That left Arnold as the last defendant connected to the case.

On Friday, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office here, Arnold, 46, of Des Moines, was given 45 days in prison, two years of supervised release and a $30,000 fine for his sex lie. U.S. District Judge Marsha J. Pechman said it was the first time she has sentenced anyone to prison for perjury in 23 years on the bench.

The case was both damaging and ironic for Intelius, which put Arnold on leave after his arrest. As TechCrunch noted, Arnold had been promoting a new Intelius iPhone app called Date Check, a “sleaze detector” that Arnold told ABC News was “like having a private investigator in your purse . . . Letting a stranger into your life is a huge risk, and in the age of Internet anonymity, a simple online search isn’t enough to tell you everything you need to know.” Punch in John Kenneth Arnold, and you’ll see.