Sir Elton John and Prince Harry have launched legal action against the owners of the Daily Mail, accusing them of bugging them and spying on them.
Actors Sadie Frost and Elizabeth Hurley have also filed cases against Associated Newspapers Ltd (ANL), one of Britain's biggest newspaper publishers..
The legal action accuses the company of having listening devices secretly placed inside cars and homes.
A press release from UK law firm Hamlins, which is representing Harry and Frost, said they had been the victims of "abhorrent criminal activity".
In the release, Hamlins outlined the details of the alleged activity saying ANL - which owns the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday and MailOnline - had engaged in the hiring of private investigators to place bugs, commissioning of people to listen into and record private phone calls, paying off of police officers for inside information and impersonating individuals to obtain medical information from private hospitals and clinics "by deception".
However, ANL has dismissed the claims as "preposterous smears".
"We utterly and unambiguously refute these preposterous smears which appear to be nothing more than a pre-planned and orchestrated attempt to drag the Mail titles into the phone hacking scandal concerning articles up to 30 years old," the BBC reported them as saying.
"These unsubstantiated and highly defamatory claims - based on no credible evidence - appear to be simply a fishing expedition by claimants and their lawyers, some of whom have already pursued cases elsewhere."
In January 2022, Prince Harry sued ANL for libel over a newspaper article alleging he attempted to keep details of his legal battle to reinstate his police protection secret from the public.
Harry, Queen Elizabeth's grandson, and his wife Meghan quit royal duties in 2020 to forge new careers in Los Angeles. The couple have since relied upon a private security team.
In July 2022, a High Court judge ruled the articles were defamatory.
In October 2019, Meghan sued Mail on Sunday over the publication of a private letter.
She filed a claim against Associated Newspapers over the "misuse of private information, infringement of copyright and beach of Data Protection Act 2018".
The legal action related to a private letter handwritten by Meghan to her estranged father, Thomas, which was published in February in the Mail on Sunday.
The fractured father-daughter relationship has been the topic of intense media coverage - especially around the time of the Duke and Duchess getting married in 2018.
