That text *IS* encoded in UTF-8 properly ("" is the byte sequence EF BB BF, which is the UTF-8 BOM).  This is just what UTF-8 encoded text looks like when it is mis-interpreted as a Latin encoding, such as ISO-8859-1 or Windows-1252.  Which mean you are likely just missing a required "utf-8" charset attribute assigned to the text so the receiver knows it is UTF-8.