British police announced Saturday that about 800 people allegedly had their phones hacked by journalists at the News of the World tabloid, after initial fears that the number of victims could top 5,800.
A Scotland Yard release said that investigators "are confident that we have personally contacted all the people who have been hacked or who are likely to have been hacked."
Even last month, investigators were saying they had identified 5,795 potential phone-hacking victims in the material collected from Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator who was jailed in 2007.
Now those same investigators say they have interviewed 2,037 people, of whom about 803 are victims. Their names appeared in notes seized from Mulcaire, who had been working for Rupert Murdoch's News of the World.
Scotland Yard said Saturday there are still "a raft of people" who need to be interviewed, although it is unlikely they were hacking victims.
Murdoch closed the tabloid in July after it was revealed that the paper had hacked into the phone of a 13-year-old murder victim, Milly Dowler, in hopes of gathering material for news stories.
The scandal erupted after the Dowler revelation but for years celebrities like Sienna Miller, Hugh Grant and Jude Law had complained of being hacked. Even former British prime minister Gordon Brown complained to police, who later found his name in Mulcaire's notes.
In the wake of the scandal, two top London police officers and several senior Murdoch executives resigned and more than a dozen News of the World journalists have been arrested, including former editor Andy Coulson, who resigned his post as Prime Minister David Cameron's media chief.
With files from The Associated Press
