That's nonsense. Noone will be able to 'recover' (or better: crack) a wallet with knowing only the address.
This is the whole sense of such a big keyspace..
Who said anything about recovering the private keys from the address? OP makes no mention of any such thing and neither do I. He says he's being asked for the hash of the address. Sounds like they want the hash160 which they can recover from the address itself.
Sometimes when you are trying to bruteforce a wallet you want public keys, addresses or extended public keys relevant to the user. This way you have something to check against. This is my best guess as to why they would want the hash160 of the public key.