Dear Christopher,
in fact no, it was a mistake from us and you can remove the directory rands in the scratch directory.
People who already had a scratch directory in their home will be contacted by us individually. But they can as well proceed as follow:
cd ~
mv scratch scratch.o
ln -s /srv/beegfs/scratch/users/${USER::1}/$USER/ scratch
ls -lad scratch #check the symbolic link is correct. If red, it's incorrect.
mv scratch.o/* scratch
rmdir scratch.o
Best