  We demonstrate that flavour-changing neutral currents in the top sector,
mediated by leptophilic scalars at the electroweak scale, can easily arise in
scenarios of new physics, and in particular in composite Higgs models. We
moreover show that such interactions are poorly constrained by current
experiments, while they can be searched for at the LHC in rare top decays and,
more generally, in the channels $pp\to tS(S)+j$, with $S\to\ell^+\ell^-$. We
provide dedicated analyses in this respect, obtaining that cut-off scales as
large as $\Lambda\sim$ 90 TeV can be probed with an integrated luminosity of
$\mathcal{L} = 150$ fb$^{-1}$.
