BAS reads weird characters before any text from local txt files

[helmish]

I'm using read text from a local file to load the account name into BAS and I've been using this feature before no problems whatsoever... recently I downloaded and installed the latest version and everytime it reads the files it shows the following which causes the script to crash too with nothing in the log

What causes it and how do I fix it?

[uraabk]

@helmish send this file here "e.txt"

[helmish]

0_1550789140294_e.txt
here it is

[uraabk]

@helmish
The text encoding of your file "ucs-2 le bom".
Change the encoding to "utf-8" and it will be nice.

[uraabk]

@helmish
0_1550789870564_e.txt