The amount of time to develop a feature makes no difference if the client didn’t want to pay for the time it would take to develop it.
If you say, "hey, for the cost of a gift card or two we can prevent a single person from disrupting our campaign" it's much more likely to get approval.
And agree, this should be extremely trivial to implement and if the project was quoted prior to development should be included in the initial scope.
We can't prevent all malicious behavior but we can prevent the easy stuff.