On August 24th I received an email from Darren A. Burns saying that he liked my work on ArtStation and wanted to buy it for £3500. He told me that the transaction would be through trademarketnft.com as an NFT. I explained that I didn't have the money to buy Ethereum, and he insisted that I do so. On August 28th he suggested that I buy $200 worth of Ethereum and that he would help me with the rest. To solve this, I created a MetaMask wallet and bought Ethereum. Once I did, I informed him and he asked me to register an account on trademarketnft.com and send the ETH to the address.
At first, I thought it was his wallet, but then I noticed that the ETH was constantly appearing and disappearing on my profile. Finally, with 0.20 ETH I created the NFT. Burns asked me for the link to the NFT, but since there were few buttons in Serbian, he asked me for a screenshot. Afterwards, he asked me to create another NFT with an additional image. I asked him how to convert the profit to create the second NFT, and he sent me 1.64 ETH. I then asked how to withdraw the profit, and he replied that he would tell me the next day.
On August 29, I found a way to send the profit to a wallet, but nothing happened. I received a message from trademarketnft.com saying that I should pay them 10% of the profit, i.e. 0.32 ETH. That same day, Burns asked me how it was going and if I had already withdrawn my money. I informed him that they were asking for 10%, and he apologized, saying that he forgot that I was supposed to pay that amount and that he was limited because he had spent everything on buying my images. I contacted the advisor of trademarketnft.com, who told me to take out a loan to pay them. According to them, they only charged for the first sale, not for the others.
On August 30th, I bought 0.16 ETH and asked where to send it. They gave me the same address as Burns. I sent the 0.16 ETH and was told I needed to pay half, not the whole. The advisor said they had misunderstood and that due to US laws they couldn't accept payments in parts.
On August 30 and 31, I contacted other NFT sites and buyers, who confirmed that they do not charge for withdrawing profits and that it was strange that they could not send to MetaMask. On September 1, Burns contacted my sister and she paid $750 to a “CoinBase advisor” who said he would resolve the issue. On September 3, after paying, my sister learned that the “advisor” was asking for an additional $400 because he was from Colombia. I contacted CoinBase and they confirmed that the advisor link was fake. On September 4, I spoke to Binance and MetaMask, the latter of which handles ETHM but at a very low value. CoinBase showed that ETHM was at a very low value compared to what was initially indicated.