I'm pretty sure that's not an error code.
Is your remote shell "clean"? In other words, does it spit out motd-style text even for non-interactive sessions?
Easy way to test (stolen from the rsync man page):
$ ssh remotehost /bin/true | wc
0 0 0
If you get anything back other than a row of zeros, your shell is not clean and will not work with scp until it is made so. As it is spewing text for non-interactive sessions, it may require admin-level intervention to fix.
EDIT:
I've verified that scp behaves exactly as I've described. If the shell returns data in non-interactive sessions, that data is returned on the client side and scp exits with a return code of '1'. The string you describe looks to me like terminal formatting codes.