Trying to remove mass text anchors

Hello all,
At my job we clean up files created by various clients. For one client (and only one...) every file we get from them is filled with what looks like text anchors when we turn on "show hidden characters". They cannot be hilighted, and sometimes there can be anywhere from 2 to 6 of them in a row.
If we don't remove them, it causes problems for the next step in our process, and manually removing them can take a long time. Does anyone know of a fast way to find/delete these?
We primarily use InDesign CC, but we also have tried this on Id CS5, CS5.5, and CS6.
Below is an example of what we see when this happens. I wasn't able to recreate the issue, I simply copy/pasted, and re-typed around it.

@Joel – hm… Is it a bug?
Several bugs there, I think.
Of course, it depends on the definition of the term "bug".
Let's see:
1. Injecting a special character (the dreaded <FEFF>) in a data merged document every time when an empty "slot" in the used CSV file is present. I think we have strong evidence for that. Feature or bug? I tend to see that as a bug. A new character is introduced where no character should be present.
2. Copy/Paste <FEFF> to the GREP search fiels and getting not \x{FEFF} but ~I is a bug.
Is that ~I a HAIR SPACE character? No. It's not… A hair space character would be: ~| (the character after the tilde is a pipe).
3. Searching for \x{FEFF} in GREP does not find the <FEFF> character. Perhaps no bug, just a limitation of the GREP implementation in InDesign
4. The same goes for the special character <0016> that represents a table object in a story:
A GREP defined as \x{0016} cannot find it, but TEXT search is able to do so.
5. The case of the injected XML tags right after a data merge. Not discussed here, and not a common problem. As far as I can see only two users here around are affected. We still don't know why this would happen. We can work around it, but don't know the culprit. So it is open to consider this a bug…

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