Did he pay for the underline and top slot?

Short answer: that plus-sign underline is not a Google-paid-ad marker. Paid listings are labeled and separated from organic results; odd characters in the snippet usually come from the page Google indexed or from how the page is encoded. @Linday333 raised the right question, and @Dani and @AncientDragon were on the right track by suggesting basic checks.

Quick, practical checks (in order)

• Inspect the raw HTML (view-source in the browser or fetch the page) and search for literal + characters or ASCII decoration. If the characters exist in visible text, Google can and will show them in the snippet.
• Check for encoding problems (Content-Type charset headers). A charset mismatch can make some characters render oddly when Google extracts text.
• Verify whether a meta description exists. If not, Google will create a snippet from page text, which may include decorative characters. See how Google generates snippets and when it uses page content: Snippets — Google Search Central.
• Repeat the query with different phrasing or the site: operator to see how Google chooses snippets for other queries.

If advising the site owner

• Remove decorative punctuation from main content and move it into CSS or images so it won’t be indexed as body text.
• Add a concise meta description and/or use data-nosnippet to block parts you don’t want shown. Guidance is in the Search Central snippets documentation.
• If the result seems spammy or irrelevant to the query, use the search-result feedback controls to flag it.

These steps let you confirm whether the characters are coming from the page itself or from an extraction/encoding quirk and give site owners practical fixes.