Bohužel nepomohlo, po úpravě

$conn = curl_init();
curl_setopt($conn, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($conn, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($conn, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$pom = curl_exec($conn);
if (substr($pom, 0,3) == pack('CCC',0xef,0xbb,0xbf)) { 
    $pom = substr($pom, 3); 
}
$return = (array) json_decode($pom);