No, not a scam at all.  I have been using them for quite awhile and they are an indispensable service when it comes to converting your alt-coins to btc so you can actually realize all of your profits with a service like Coinbase. I have them as my default for deposits of Namecoins that I get in excess when mining primarily btc using BTCGuild with their merged mining of btc and nmc.  When my nmc hoard builds up to a nice amount I'll go and get a couple btc from them and BTC-E.com is the only place I have found that does this.

One Warning: You do need to see if people are currently gaming with the alt-currency that you want to exchange for btc because it can help or really hurt you. This site is the one place that is very easy to manipulate because of the lack of other market centers that trade these alt-coins and experienced users will take advantage of the novice if given the chance.