The exchange’s full statement reads:
Dear Clients!
BTC-e’s official standpoint on this issue is as follows: Ethereum Classic in the current circumstances is a scam. The Ethereum community decided to implement the hard fork in order to switch to the new chain. All major pools and exchanges (including BTC-e) did exactly that.
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.
We continue to receive requests from our customers demanding to return the ETCs that are supposedly deposited in our ETH wallet. We cannot do that for the reason specified above.
Anyone, who purports that we sent the coins to Poloniex in order to sell them, can check all the transactions on the blockchain. All transactions are recorded and it is easy to trace the sender and the volumes of coins sent.
Best Regards,
BTC-e Team”