The consumer finance journalist Martin Lewis is dropping his lawsuit against Facebook over its repeated failure to prevent scam adverts from using his name and image, after the company agreed to donate £3m to set up an anti-scam project with Citizens Advice and launch a UK-specific one-click reporting tool.

Lewis, who launched the lawsuit after an estimated “thousands, possibly tens of thousands” of people fell prey to scams promoted using his reputation, said a court battle was never his aim.

“My aim was to try and reduce and stop the hideous number of scam adverts that had been going on in UK online advertising that have really hurt real people,” he said.

“The first time my attention was drawn to this was a man who accused me of scamming him out of £19,000. I don’t do adverts, full stop. Any advert with me in it is a lie, it’s a scam. That’s where the anger came from.”

Facebook’s donation to Citizens Advice, which will total £2.5m in cash as well as £500,000 of vouchers for the company’s online ad service, will be used to fund an independent scam prevention project, Citizens Advice Scams Action (Casa). When Casa launches in May, it will work to identify and tackle online scams, as well as support victims.

The social network will also launch a UK-specific tool that lets British users easily and quickly flag ads they believe to be scams. It will be backed up by a dedicated internal team to handle the reports. It will also proactively investigate trends and find and shut down violating ads.

“We don’t allow these ads on our platform,” said Steve Hatch, Facebook’s regional director for northern Europe. “We have a zero-tolerance approach to people using these ads on our platform, but we know that zero tolerance doesn’t mean zero occurrence.”

Hatch said the company would monitor the effectiveness of the tool, and added that it was “very imaginable that we’d push this out into other markets” if it worked, but declined to commit to a global rollout.

Lewis said Facebook was making great strides in tackling scam adverts but other online publishers were not. “Over the last few weeks I have again been plagued by scam adverts. A few of them have been on Facebook and when we’ve told them they’ve taken them down quickly.

“But that’s not the case with Google. There have been ads, and the problem with Google is that the adverts on Google aren’t just on Google, they’re on websites, and they’re on apps. And it’s not just Google, it’s the Yahoo platform.

“Google and the rest of you – online advertising has to stand up and take some responsibility.” Lewis said while he had been reporting the adverts to Google, the company was “not even giving us a direct contact, even though I am a major target of scam ads”.

He added: “I want every online advertiser to see this as a warning shot across their bows.”

In a statement, a Google spokesman said: “Because we want the ads people see on Google to be useful and relevant, we take immediate action to prevent fake and inappropriate ads. We have a tool where anyone can report these ads and these complaints are reviewed manually by our team. In 2017, we removed 3.2 billion bad ads and we’re constantly updating our policies as we see new threats emerge.”