Invalid character in the given encoding. Line 2, position 1 error.

I have zero understanding of this error. I have never encountered this error before and don't get why i am having it, this started occurring just after i crashed (not blue-screened, cable in the back of my computer got knocked) my characters are legitimate, i have never been banned nor have any of my characters been involved in statpadding or any other activities that would get me banned/wiped from the census. I do not know which character this is, i have a suspicion it is my BR 100 (Zyr0s, which has incredibly bad stats and should be the most average character on the list i put in). My OS is Windows 7 Ultimate Edition.

Has anyone else had this issue in the past as I haven't been able to find a thread or post linked to this.

Does this always come up for you? This error used to only come up if the API was having issues and invalid data was returned back. But I've been seeing this come up more frequently for users. I wonder if they changed the format of some of the data.