It's likely that all the characters are being transferred and stored in the same charset (probably a Unicode one) regardless of what character is entered. The r

It's likely that all the characters are being transferred and stored in the same charset (probably a Unicode one) regardless of what character is entered. The replacement glyph (the question mark) might be caused by their use of a font with incomplete Unicode coverage, or (more likely) by a buggy "take the first character of each word in their name" algorithm, for example using the first byte and then special-casing Chinese under the mistaken impression that nothing else needs more than one byte.