SCP not working in EC2 AWS

Question

I can SSH into the EC2 instance:

ssh -i "my_key.pem" ec2-user@my-public-ip

However, scp doesn't work:

scp -r –i "my_key.pem" ./my_file ec2-user@my-public-ip:/home/ec2-user/my_file

Permission denied (public key).

lost connection

I've also tried using public instance DNS, but nothing changes.

Any idea why is this happening and how to solve it?