One of the largest digital exchanges and trading platforms has expressed rather a harsh attitude towards the alternative Ethereum currency.

“BTC-e’s official standpoint on this issue is as follows: Ethereum Classic in the current circumstances is a scam,” the company claims.

BTC-e explains that ETC coins were transferred to Poloniex exchange. The customers are now seeking to get back coins which were supposed to be stored in the BTC-e’s Ethereum (ETH) wallet.

“On the second day after the start of ETC trading BTC-e received a notification from Poloniex, saying that we need to secure the ETCs in our ETH wallet. At the time of notification, most of these coins have already been sent to Poloniex by our users. So there were almost none of these coins in our wallet,” the statement says.

BTC-e’s official statement explains that the platform, as well as other leading exchanges and pools, switched to the new blockchain after the Ethereum’s hard fork had been implemented.

“Anyone, who purports that we sent the coins to Poloniex in order to sell them, can check all the transactions on blockchain. All transactions are recorded and it is easy to trace the sender and the volumes of coins sent,” the company adds.

Earlier Andrew DeSantis, a US developer, has found out that when a user transfers a sum of ether coins from an exchange platform that does not support both versions of tokens (Coinbase) to the platform that does (Poloniex), the amount is seemingly transferred twice, in both currencies – ETC and ETH. Soon both the author and his followers found out that the operations were not confirmed in the Ethereum blockchain, therefore, the developers have managed to close the loophole.

Ethereum Classic is an alternative token of the original pre-hard fork version of the Ethereum blockchain. The creation of Ethereum Classic was announced in mid-July after the split in the community over the hard fork and transition to the new blockchain. The project’s aim is to preserve original Ethereum with immutability and decentralisation as its core characteristics.

Alex Lee