Question about being able to receive money

Description

Hello, so I am a fairly new music producer and today some artist finally wanted to buy a beat from me for 250$ and when they tried to send me the payment they told me I need someone to send me 50$ to « activate my account » and then they will be able to send the money to me for the beat.
My question is if this is actually real or are they **bleep** me? like I’m from Israel and the artist is from overseas (not sure from where prob UK/US) so maybe it has to do with that? I really don’t know a lot about how it works and didn’t expect these kind of problems so I would really like some help about this.
Also it might be helpful to note that when they tried to send the money at first it asked them to enter a security code that was sent to my phone and only then they told me the thing about the 50$ and activating my account…