Unless YOU reached out to them and you KNOW they are reputable (as in you’ve seen their gallery in person or someone you know personally and trust unequivocally can vouch for them), it’s definitely a scam.

Put another way… Give me only $15 and I’ll pretend to display your photos in a supposed gallery.

exiftool will adjust the date/time in the exif data by any number of minutes… to adjust for internal clocks that are slightly off or to adjust for timezone.