Character encoding problem with pound sign

Hi everyone,

We have implement a servlet which returns values in json format. The values are retrieved from an external api call and saved in crx/de, then filtered and returned in json format using a servlet. In the response any string that contains a pound sign is displayed as �. The character encoding of the response is set to 'utf-8'. We are using AEM 6.5.12. Any idea how we can fix this? Thank you.